FROM HOLLANDE TO CHARLIE AND THE BATACLAN AND THEIR AFTERMATH, 2012–2016
The victories of François Hollande and of the Socialist majority in the parliament in May and June 2012 benefited, as we have seen, from a “Muslim vote” that seemed to foreshadow a reconciliation between these voters and the sphere of institutional politics after a five-year presidency during which Nicolas Sarkozy had accentuated divisions. The elections took place right after the massacres perpetrated by Mohamed Merah, when the deep ramifications and significance of the phenomenon could not yet be gauged and when its effects on third-generation Salafist jihadists were even less foreseeable.
Subsequent events during Hollande’s term occurred under much less promising auspices. As the Nemmouche affair revealed, terrorism had taken root at the heart of French society. It reached a high point with the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket in January 2015 and with the massacres at the Bataclan and in Saint-Denis in November, which had worldwide repercussions. These were followed by the strange circumstances of Sid Ahmed Ghlam’s arrest in April of the same year, the decapitation in June of a CEO by one of his employees who had a radical Islamist past, and the attempted massacre in August aboard a train from Amsterdam to Paris by a Moroccan residing in Europe. This trend continued in 2016 with the stabbing of policemen and a Catholic priest and with the spectacular truck attack on the crowd celebrating Bastille Day on July 14 on the seaside Promenade des Anglais in Nice—killing eighty-six. All of these events indicated the increasingly rapid rise of French Islamism and the growing interpenetration of the jihad in Syria and the jihad in France.
Events accelerated after ISIS proclaimed the caliphate on June 29, 2014, at the beginning of Ramadan, only a short time before an Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In France, this offensive aroused violent protest demonstrations in the course of which the themes of jihad and hatred of Jews blurred the message of the traditional opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, who belonged to the progressive and anti-imperialist left.
These demonstrations were not the only ones that drove a wedge between the Muslim population and Muslim voters on the one hand and the majority of Socialist parliamentary majority presidential voters on the other. The Manif pour tous against gay marriage, in which many Muslim associations participated, and then the School Boycott Days (Journées de retraite à l’école, or JRE) protesting the teaching of “gender theory,” contributed to this phenomenon.
The rout of the left in the municipal elections of March 2014 was due especially to massive abstention in the banlieues, where many Muslims live. In some cases, notably in Seine-Saint-Denis, the inclusion of Islamist-leaning figures on the center-right lists helped the latter win. Hardly two years after 2012, this circumstantial conservative alliance, which turned on a common rejection of gay marriage, demolished the accord between Muslim voters and the left.
The European elections of May 25, 2014—in which the National Front, using a rhetoric opposing the “Islamization of France,” performed extraordinarily well—took place the day after the massacre at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, which Mehdi Nemmouche, a follower of Mohamed Merah from Roubaix who had returned from the jihad in Syria, was suspected of having perpetrated. A week later, Nemmouche was arrested in Marseille carrying a significant arsenal of weapons. As during the 2012 presidential campaign, the interference of jihadist terrorism in an electoral process crystallized and redrew ethnoreligious cleavages that no longer coincided with the age-old opposition between left and right: now it was Marine Le Pen’s party that reaped the benefits.
It was at the end of this process that the cataclysm of January 2015 occurred with the massacre committed by the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly. It was in line with the acts imputed to Merah and Nemmouche and completed the interpenetration of the French, Syrian, and global jihads. Like their predecessors, the January 7 conspirators killed Jews in accord with the recommendations of the Islamic Global Resistance Call, but they took Abu Musab al-Suri’s precepts all the way by targeting “Islamophobic” opinion-makers in the editorial offices of a weekly satirical paper that had emerged from the post-1968 movement. Charlie Hebdo had drawn attention by publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad but had always defended the cause of immigrants and integration.
This event brought to a climax the third wave of jihadism and represented a kind of cultural September 11—just as the “blessed double raid” against New York and Washington had brought the second wave, that of al-Qaeda, to its culmination. The immense protests it aroused on January 11, in which almost four million persons demonstrated in the streets of France, and which led many heads of state and government to come to Paris, were subjected to various interpretations—some reasonable, some impassioned. These interpretations would be tested by the indiscriminate killings perpetrated in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13—and by their aftermath in the 2016 jihadist attacks.