EPILOGUE

BETWEEN KALASH AND MARTEL: THE NATIONALIST HAMMER AND THE JIHADIST ANVIL

On September 21, 2015, the municipal council of Lunel-Viel, a residential village adjacent to the town of Lunel, announced that the commune was prepared to accept a family of Syrian refugees and that the latter would be lodged in the presbytery, a building that had recently been vacated. On that first day of autumn, the flow toward Europe of millions of people fleeing the wars that followed the Arab upheavals or seeking a better life divided public opinions and states, which were torn between solidarity with human distress and the fear that a new social burden would further slow the depressed economies of the Old Continent. At the time of the jihadist attacks, two of the terrorists at the Stade de France were Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Most of the refugees were Muslims, as is indicated by the multitude of women’s headscarves in the crowds who were waiting at the borders and whose images were broadcast every day in television reports—thus providing fodder for the National Front, which was leading in the opinion polls for the December 2015 regional elections.

In the Lunel area, in this emblematic year, the symbolic contrast between the arrival of the family of Syrian refugees that would be settled on humanitarian grounds in an apartment made available by the dechristianization of France, on the one hand, and the twenty or so members of a brand-new mosque a few blocks away—who had been born in France but who left the land of religious laxity to carry out jihad in Syria and who might return to massacre the inhabitants—on the other hand, is striking. This contrast, along with the shock of the January 2015 attacks in Paris followed by the jihadist aftershocks perpetrated on French soil, described earlier, strengthened the progress of a political far right that denounces the “Islamization of France.” This hyperbolic language of religious antagonism and of the clash of civilizations also crystallizes social and racial confrontations that are likely to have repercussions in future elections.

Before being marginalized by his daughter Marine and granddaughter Marion, the founder of the Le Pen dynasty, Jean-Marie Le Pen—who has a weakness for striking, inflammatory phrases that are often in poor taste, occasionally condemned by the courts, but always effective in giving voice to the discontentment and frustration of a growing segment of the French electorate—came up with an ultimate hashtag following the January attacks. Faced by the #jesuisCharlie chanted by the demonstrators of the Republican marches of January 11, 2015, who had banned the National Front from their ranks—a point Emmanuel Todd failed to note—and by the #jenesuispasCharlie and #jesuisCoulibaly found on the Facebook walls of some young people in the banlieues, Jean-Marie Le Pen made the hashtag #jesuisCharlieMartel the final spasm of a long life in politics. This invocation of the founder of the Carolingian dynasty of French monarchs and the unifier of the Frankish kingdom, who put a stop to Andalusian governor Abd el-­Rahman’s jihadist “blessed raid” in Poitiers in 732, exactly a hundred years after the Prophet’s death, is a commonplace of National Front rhetoric. (In 2002, the year that saw the party’s head qualify for the second round of voting in the presidential election, his supporters had rallied around the slogan “Charles Martel 732, Le Pen 2002.”)

In the 2002 presidential runoff, Le Pen ultimately won only 17.9 percent of the vote against Jacques Chirac, whose clear victory inaugurated without glory the first five-year term (quinquennat) of the Fifth Republic (which had had seven-year terms since its inception). Fifteen years later, on the eve of the presidential election of 2017, his daughter and successor as head of the party, Marine Le Pen, is projected by most polling organizations to have enough electoral support to qualify for the second round of presidential voting. What is more, and in contrast to her father, she is expected to lead all other candidates in the first round. Previously the traditional parties of the right and left succeeded in managing the challenge of the far right through various means. During his first term in office (1981–1988), the Machiavellian François Mitterrand demonized Jean-Marie Le Pen, thus dividing the vote and making possible his own re-election in 1988. Nineteen years later, in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy siphoned off Le Pen’s electorate by adopting his rhetoric, thereby easily winning an election in which the voters were still traumatized by the great riots in the impoverished immigrant banlieues in autumn 2005. Thus did the leaders of the traditional political parties, each in his own way, exploit its far-right adversary to conquer or recapture the presidency.

More recently, and under the leadership of Marine Le Pen and her advisor, Philippe Péninque, the National Front has succeeded in “de-demonizing” itself. Indeed, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 2015, it is clear that jihadism has displaced the National Front in the role of the archetype of evil that must be destroyed. Now all the presidential candidates accuse their adversaries of being either accomplices of the jihadists or impotent in face of the jihadist threat. This displacement has been to the great benefit of the National Front. The presidential standard-bearers of the “Republican” left and right are reduced to fighting for second place behind Madame Le Pen in the first round. None of them imagines that he might come in ahead of her.

Since the 2012 election and the Merah affair, the political approach to terrorism in France has had contrasting effects on the government and the opposition parties. During his 2012 campaign for re-election, Nicolas Sarkozy failed to take advantage of this; on the contrary, the electorate blamed him for poor police management of Merah, who was well known to and closely followed by intelligence agents in the months before his terrorist acts. The winner of the 2012 presidential contest, François Hollande, received a boost in the opinion polls when he acted the role of statesman on January 11, 2015, and marched at the head of the demonstrators on the boulevards of Paris, surrounded by the top leaders of the planet. But this boost was quickly erased by the structural parameters of his unpopularity; his approval rating in opinion polls plunged to 13 percent just before the attacks in November 2015—and would reach a historical low with 4 percent in late 2016, so that he finally drew the political conclusions of his staggering unpopularity and decided not to run for re-election in 2017.

The National Front then seemed in a position to benefit almost automatically from the population’s anxiety connected with terrorism. Each time a jihadist with a Kalashnikov threatens to massacre innocent people on French soil to the cry of “Allahu akbar!” more fodder is provided to those who obsessively denounce the “Islamization of France” or demand the closing of the borders. And this is only strengthened when the state appears incapable of suppressing a phenomenon almost all of whose actors in 2015 were known to the police or to the courts, from the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly to Abdelhamid Abaaoud and the 2016 killers Larossi Abballah, who slew two married police officers at their home, and Adil Kermiche, who stabbed an octogenarian Catholic priest during mass in his church. They had antiterrorism files and had even been previously imprisoned, whether they fell into jihadism through the prison incubator or had already been sentenced and served their time for that offense.

The establishment’s incompetence has its origin in a cultural particularity that is not unrelated to the fact that France holds the absolute record for exporting jihadists from the European Union. This has to do in large measure with the ways in which France’s political elite is recruited. These combine the peer networks of the obsolete parties from which they come—which maintain pseudo-experts who block public financing for in-depth research that would expose their imposture—­with the stranglehold of high-ranking bureaucrats who are omniscient but incapable of learning anything about national security that the curriculum of the elite schools of public administration had not trained them for. Other comparable European states, the United ­Kingdom and Germany in particular, have a much more inclusive approach to choosing the political elite, to which are added members of civil society and professionals selected for their experience and competence. They do not hesitate to seek—and find—advice on the complex questions of contemporary Islam provided by experts from the university community.

By contrast, France has precipitated the decline of the field of Islamic studies (in which it was considered world-class for more than a century), particularly during Sarkozy and Hollande’s presidential terms. The country of Louis Massignon, Jacques Berque, and Maxime ­Rodinson, orientalists and scholars known all over the world, can no longer offer training in the field of Islam to the best and the brightest. The most talented of the younger generation of Islamicists—and Arabists—in training must now go abroad for advanced studies, threatening the very continuation of the production of knowledge in a country where the domestic stakes related to Islam and Muslims have become central.

Neither is innovative thinking to be found at the top of the highly hierarchical French security apparatus, which would need to be retooled in order to grasp the shift in jihadist organization from pyramidal structures to an unprecedented model in which the actors operate in swarms. The price to be paid for this voluntary blindness and deliberate deafness is already great, and it will be still greater for politicians who are not up to the job, who now lack solutions to the challenges of jihadism, and who are also incapable of responding to the National Front’s tirades in this domain.

In fall 2015, the coincidence of the jihadist attacks with the new influx of migrants from the Middle East, a pretext for disparate, emotional, and embarrassed responses on the part of European Union states, provided Marine Le Pen’s party with an electoral gift when the campaign for the regional elections on December 6 and 13 began. Encouraged by favorable opinion polls, it aspired to win two important fiefs, Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie and Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, where Marine and her niece Marion Le Pen were the respective heads of the lists. Even though the party eventually failed in that attempt, its unprecedentedly strong showing in the first round made the extreme-right National Front the pivotal party in French politics. Visiting Calais on October 2 of that year, where some three thousand migrants were crowded under precarious conditions in the “jungle” around the entrance to the tunnel under the English Channel, trying to enter clandestinely the British paradise of black market work, and where a lack of security and an absence of hygiene had become the obsessive concerns of part of the population, the leader of the National Front warned against “being submerged by migrants” and “Islamist terrorism”:

Calais is a city under siege, in the literal sense of the term. The residents barricade themselves in their homes. […] I don’t accept seeing French people feel like foreigners in their own homes. Don’t give in. Don’t forget that we are at home here!

These remarks are all the more striking in a city whose very name has been associated with capitulation and humiliation for generations of French schoolchildren. Calais was the site of a siege by the English army of Edward III in 1347, and upon its capitulation the city was forced to hand over six of its leading citizens in their shirtsleeves, their heads bowed and a rope around their necks, in order to lift the siege and spare the lives of its inhabitants. The city was subject to English rule for the next two centuries. This historical episode, somewhat fictionalized in later retelling, was elevated to the status of founding myth under the French Third Republic (1871–1940), and the famous bronze statues by Auguste Rodin depicting the six citizens were installed in front of the Calais City Hall in 1895.

Even if only a small proportion of the National Front’s potential electorate believes in the vague and inapplicable solutions proposed by its heralds—from France’s exit from Europe and the euro to the exclusion of residents who are not French citizens from welfare and family benefits—the party of the Le Pen dynasty has finally been able to recover, since the advent of Jean-Marie’s daughter, the “tribune function” that the late professor Georges Lavau attributed in the 1970s to the Communist Party alone. The National Front’s electorate is much more differentiated socially than that of the “workers’ party” of old, but it has mobilized the support of voters to whom it gives the sense that it is voicing a “truth” hidden by the “establishment,” just as the French Communist Party used to articulate the alleged truth of the “class struggle” masked by “bourgeois ideology.” The constitution of mythical “plebs” of which the National Front is supposed to be the tribune is adding votes to what is already a record level. In Lunel, after the scandals connected with the local jihadist seedbed and the statements made by the president of the mosque, the left-wing candidate in the March 2015 departmental elections was able to defeat the National Front in extremis, by a mere 0.64 percent of the votes, only by soliciting votes … in this same mosque, among other places.

This small-town squabble in the age of French jihad is emblematic of a country in which Islamism and its multiple political uses are now able to become an important variable in elections. But the polarization between the Kalash of the jihadist and the martel1 of the National Front, the outcome of the strategy Abu Musab al-Suri advocated in his Global Islamic Resistance Call as a premonitory symptom of civil war in Europe, went so far as to draw nourishment, in its very inspiration by the founding myth of Charles Martel, from an almost perfect mirror effect.

Interested Web users can consult a YouTube video, about fifteen minutes long, entitled Lorsque l’État islamique était en France (When the Islamic State Was in France). Posted by various sources that present themselves under the names of “True History,” “French Taliban,” or “Dajjal [Antichrist] Magazine,” it recounts the great feats of an earlier, pre-modern jihad that ravaged France in the first half of the eighth century until 759, when Pepin the Short, Charles Martel’s son, took back Narbonne, a city in southwest France which was the Saracens’ advanced stronghold (ribat, in Arabic). From this stronghold, they had been launching “blessed raids,” some of which reached up the Rhône Valley as far as Burgundy. I discovered this video in an appendix to the website of Salim Laïbi, candidate in the Marseille Parliamentary elections of 2012. A dentist from the seaside town of L’Estaque and for a time a conspiracy theorist along with Soral and Dieudonné, he later quarreled with them, in a contest of anathemas that is customary in the “fachosphere,” and moved closer to the sycophants of “fundamentalist Islam.”

The video reminds us, in its form and message, of Omar Omsen’s 19 HH, L’histoire de l’humanité (The History of Humanity), which was, as we have seen, one of the principal vectors of recruitment for jihad in Syria: it featured a haunting soundtrack based on warriors’ hymns chanted a capella by male voices, a montage of images hijacked in the manner of the mash-up, onto which an ideological content is superimposed, and so forth. Although here, too, the goal is also to “reveal the hidden truths of history,” the aim is no longer to project jihad toward the “land of Sham” but, inversely, to reconstitute this precedent, which is supposed to have given rise to the Islamic conquest of “a vast region that corresponded, for two hundred and seventy-five years, to half the current territory of France.” Such a “truth” is said to have been concealed by Islamophobe official history, whose bards “hastened to make all traces of the Muslim presence in France disappear.”

To do that, the jihadist video focuses, as does the far right, on the founding myth of Charles Martel. But contrary to the National Front, which appropriates that name in order to glorify it, the video deconstructs it by reducing the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD to a simple, inconsequential incident, drawing on the revisionism of some historians to enlist academic knowledge in the service of jihadist propaganda. In Islamic historiography, the Battle of Poitiers is reduced to the rank of a skirmish and is designated only by the name of “the Road of the Martyrs,” because Abd el-Rahman, the governor of Andalusia, was killed there.

The material used begins with extracts from a low-quality film produced by a Canadian Islamist entitled The Lost Kingdom: The Story of al-Andalus, which feeds a prolific and nostalgic line deploring the loss of Muslim Spain and presenting the Reconquista as a paragon of Islamophobia that is all the more unacceptable because, according to the doctrine, the whole territory that was once under Islamic control must remain Muslim for eternity. The video was made under the auspices of Sheikh Waleed Abdul Hakim, a preacher and lecturer with Salafist tendencies in Toronto who is omnipresent on the anglophone Internet.

The sequences used come from the section entitled “The Fierce Clash with France,” and viewers are warned that now “history is repeating itself.” The sequences are mixed with portions of film that are shot in the same style as that used for the Muslim epics produced in abundance by television channels in the Arab world to exalt the story of the expansion of Islam in its first centuries but that bear the logo of the French-German cultural television channel Arte. The video ends with a still shot of General de Gaulle, accompanied by the famous quotation extracted from his radio interview on March 5, 1959, with Alain Peyrefitte, which prepares this confidant of the head of state to defend Algerian independence against the supporters of French Algeria who want to integrate it into France:

If we integrated them, if all the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria were considered French, how would we prevent them from coming to settle in the metropole [the European part of France, as opposed to the colonies], where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (the two churches), but Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées (the two mosques)!

This is followed by two shots of press conferences given by presidents Sarkozy and Hollande expressing their concern regarding the confrontation between Islam and the West and the diffusion of terrorism to the Sahel and to North Africa, thus threatening France.

The video presents the Islamic conquest of southern France in the eighth century as a strategy originally intended to take Constantinople by attacking it from the rear and to reach Damascus, then the capital of the Muslim Omeyyad Empire, from the northern coast of the Mediterranean. For spectators in 2015, this fantasized Islamic geopolitics of an earlier age acquires an “excessively topical” color: it was the French jihadists who found their “road to Damascus,” whereas the Syrian refugees fleeing the war followed it in the opposite direction, and the Constantinople of old was transformed into the Istanbul of modern Turkey, the hub where their opposed trajectories intersect. As for the geography of the France subjected to Islam in the eighth century, its citadels were Toulouse (“Talousha for the mujahideen,” a deformation of the Latin Tolosa, and we have seen what a jihadist seedbed it became), and Nîmes, in the lower Rhône valley, famous these days on the Islamist Web, where there is a photo showing how jihadists from the down-market housing projects in that city have sprayed walls with graffiti bearing the name of their neighborhood buildings in ­Ramadi in Iraq, under the auspices of the ISIS caliphate. This astonishing anticipation of a cartography of the strongholds of contemporary French jihad ends in the city of Sens, “a hundred kilometers [south] from Paris, the farthest point in France reached by the Muslim army.”

Citing the crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon, the author of the romantic Civilisation des Arabes (Civilization of the Arabs) published in 1884, in support of its minimization of the importance of the Battle of Poitiers, the video “reveals the hidden truths of history” in an insert that is superimposed on images of triumphal cavalry charges by turbaned horsemen cutting down soldiers with shields bearing the sign of the Cross:

You can clearly see that, contrary to a received idea, Charles ­Martel’s battle at Poitiers did not put an end to the Ghazawât [raids] of the mujahideen [soldiers of the jihad] in southern France, quite the contrary!

The subsequent conquest of Narbonne by Christian troops is treated as a calamity for the peoples of the south. It is illustrated by scenes in which Crusaders tear a child away from its veiled mother, anticipating the “Islamophobia” of our own time. Finally, “the corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa’s conquest of Nice” in 1543, which lasted only one year, is presented as the acme of this first glorious phase of the jihad on French soil. If the video can make the link, almost half a millennium later, with the robber, jihadist, and video maker Omar Omsen, thus placing 19 HH in the ideological and mental tradition of Lorsque l’État islamique était en France, the historical reality of the siege of 1543–1544 and the trace it has left on the local memory are more complex than this document suggests. The surrounding and attacking of the city was a joint operation by the armies of King Francis I of France and Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent against a stronghold belonging to the Duchy of Savoy.

In Nice, this episode, immortalized by the cannonballs shot by Barbarossa’s galleys, still present in many façades in the old city, is celebrated especially through the heroic and mythified figure of ­Catherine Ségurane. This laundress, subsequently enthroned as the popular patron saint of Nice’s folklore, is supposed to have run up to a janissary who had climbed on the rampart on August 15, 1543, the feast of the protectress Holy Virgin, and clobbered him with her laundry bat, which in this case had become an avatar of the martel (hammer). According to the legend, this virgin with a sad face, as is indicated by her dialectal epithet Maufada, wrenched the banner marked with the crescent of Islam away from the dead Turk. Then, disrobing and displaying her “fleshy parts” from the top of ramparts, she wiped them with the flag, restoring courage to the besieged, who ended up repelling the Ottoman invader and his French ally.

On September 13, 2015, two months to the day before the massacre at the Bataclan, the far-right identitarian group Nissa rebela organized, as it had each year for six years, a parade in oumage a Segurana (in homage to Ségurane) in the port neighborhood. It took place in a tense context, in which immigrants and refugees who had crossed the Mediterranean were piling up at the Italian border at Menton, thirty kilometers to the east, and trying to enter France. The Nissa rebela movement demanded their expulsion in the name of the “remigration” it advocates. The preceding year, on September 8, 2014, the parade, preceded by children in traditional costume, surrounded by red smoke bombs, testified that “the reference to Catherine Ségurane is not a matter of folklore but of memory.” According to the head of this identitarian group, Catherine is the “guiding light”—“the path.” “It is she, the laundress, reminding us that in Nice as elsewhere it is always the people that rise up when governments betray or surrender,” he told the press, making a transhistorical allusion to Francis I’s compromise with the sultan. The allusion becomes more precise when the Ottoman invader of yesteryear is replaced by “one of these thousands of ‘French’ jihadists, dozens of whom have left Nice and are now fighting in Iraq or Syria but who will end up coming back here to continue their war.”

In the same month, September 2015, the philosopher Pierre Manent published the most structured, painful, and, in many respects, paradoxical reflection on the events of the previous January. His Situation de la France (Situation of France), a title reminiscent of the religious and nationalist writer Charles Péguy (1873–1914), begins by treating these events as a symptom of the country’s moral and institutional decay—in particular the failure of secularism, which has become, in Manent’s view, its civil religion. He advocates a new type of national compact in which the “customs of Muslims” must be accepted and endorsed by the law on a community basis, in “friendship” with the customs of Christians and Jews.

This proposal, made by one of the main French Catholic ­philosophers—a disciple of Raymond Aron, co-founder of the review ­Commentaire, and a resolute supporter of political liberalism—aroused reactions that were as passionate as they were contrasting. Lauded by La Croix and Le Figaro, as well as by the website Islam & Info, which conveys “total Islam” propaganda, it was reviled by other publications as a “capitulation” to sharia, which would thus be granted legitimacy in France. Although Pierre Manent’s work, like that of Emmanuel Todd, makes room for what Nietzsche calls, in Beyond Good and Evil, “philosophers’ instincts” (that is, the moral ideal that precedes the intellection of the world)—Manent conceiving France within Catholicism, Todd conceiving it on the basis of his self-definition as a “Judeo-­Bolshevik”—the import of the two reflections inspired by the events of January differs in nature.

Todd refrains from a serious analysis of the killings perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers and by Amedy Coulibaly, being obsessed instead by the demonstration on Sunday, January 11, 2015, which he sees as propagating an Islamophobic ideology that now serves as a substitute for the atavistic anti-Semitism attributed to an earlier generation of French elites. Manent, by contrast, is not interested in this demonstration, which was overtly secular in character, but instead considers the whole sequence of events from January 7 to January 9 as a significant entity that has to be taken seriously:

A war is being waged, and it has been declared on us. A war in which sometimes Jews alone are targeted […], sometimes along with Christians, blasphemers, police officers, and in general the authorities and institutions of Western nations, and sometimes, finally, they are targeted not only with the latter, but also with “apostate” Muslims.

Manent’s argument consists of both a diagnosis and a prescription. The diagnosis points to the moral and institutional decay of a nation that has become “weak” by its dilution in an evanescent European Union and by the substitution of the secular ideology of human rights for the social bond that was founded on the Christian religion, even though Europeans “have refused for two generations to raise the political question and the religious question outside which the life of Europe loses all its meaning.” And this emptiness has led to the irruption of a “strong” Islam within contemporary France, of which the massacres in January are the hyperbolic manifestation. Manent’s prescription advocates giving this Islam a legitimate place in the Republic as a community of its own, so that Muslims, without having to betray their attachment to their dogma, might become full-fledged members of the French nation. In this compact, Manent sees an opportunity to detach Muslim citizens of the Republic from radical influences and financing coming from the Arabian Peninsula, and he convinces himself that they will thus accept reasonable arrangements without coercion, voluntarily giving up both the wearing of the niqab for women and polygamy.

One can only marvel at the fact that a work written in 2015 by one of the most prominent intellectuals on the right and entitled Situation de la France has, as its main or even sole subject, the presence of Islam in this country. Long limited to specialized studies, this question emerged in public debate only through political manipulation or media excess. It is now established at the heart of an existential reflection on the present and future of the nation, and it has been elevated to the rank of the society’s central question. Nonetheless, as presented by Pierre Manent, Islam is understood not as a social object situated in a field—France—that is traversed by conflicts between actors competing for hegemony over its expression. Instead, it is posited as a religious entity pre-existing any social construction—a transcendent community characterized by a table of specific “customs” attributed to its faithful.

The approach that has guided the present book does not allow for an a priori essentialization of a social group by its mores—even in the Latin sense of the term, in which it refers to the whole set of a human group’s habitual ways of life. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Islamization is now more widespread in the banlieues of France than it was when I surveyed these same territories thirty years ago while writing Les Banlieues de l’islam: naissance d’une religion en France (The Banlieues of Islam: Birth of a Religion in France), published 1987. And yet the fact of this growing Islamization does not sum up the diversity of French population groups of Muslim culture or descent. Islamization is taking place in the context of a battle for hegemony over these groups being waged by movements and sects ranging from the Muslim Brothers to the jihadists by way of the Tabligh and the Salafists. The rise of these movements is undeniable. However, to concede victory to these zealots and to entrust their claim to represent the Muslim citizens or inhabitants of France as they have imagined it would be to underestimate the diversity of French people of Muslim provenance.

By analyzing the processes of sway over the expression of Islam—in particular, the political and social phenomena that cross Abu Musab al-Suri’s Global Islamic Resistance Call with the emergence of ­Generation Y—we have tried to show that it is within the groups concerned that the most bitter battles are being fought. The elimination of “apostates” by jihadists who want to terrorize their co-religionists and force them to adopt their views constitutes the extreme form of this struggle.

Although the killers of 2015 have not yet won the battle, we have to admit with Pierre Manent that the incantation of the secular principles of the Republic by politicians who lack both inspiration and vision is far from being able to meet the challenge posed by a French jihad whose rise we have traced over the past decade and beyond. We can agree with Manent that beyond the monstrosity of the crimes committed against France by some of those who, in spite of themselves, are among its children, even if they have gone astray, terrorism in France is also the symptom of a malaise in our civilization.

Does that mean that we must also agree with Manent that “a certain communalism” (communautarisation) “is desirable” given the “ideological lie of the new secularism that seeks to force us to pretend to be only individual citizens” in a “nation marked by Christianity”? On the contrary, all through this book we have shown that the social actors who claim to follow “total” Islam in its diverse forms, from overexcited identity politics to the descent into violence, are resorting to religion to transform their social fury into a political strategy. In such a context, the places of religion or obedience to which the ­secularism of the Republic grants a legitimate place within human society—the church, the mosque, the synagogue, and the temple (whether Protestant or Masonic)—cannot be erected into the primordial relays of state intervention. If at the end of this development an institution seems to us to have to be re-founded and reconstructed in order to cope with this immense challenge over the long term, it is public education, from the nursery school to the university, that has now fallen into poverty as the result of a blameworthy incompetence on the part of the whole political class.

From my visit to Lunel, the ephemeral “capital of French jihad,” in 2014, I have retained the image of a single place where all the city’s components live together in a “friendship,” to use Pierre Manent’s term, that allows them, through work and shared values, to move beyond atavism and communalism: the lycée—the French high school. I hope this book has helped to show that the national debate and the implementation of public policies called for by terror in France cannot succeed without being based on the knowledge that can still be produced—­but for how much longer?—by our universities.

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1 A reference to Charles Martel, whose byname “Martel” (Latin Martellus) means “hammer.”