FROM THE MARCH OF THE BEURS TO CHARLIE AND THE BATACLAN
Only two months separate the first anniversary of the massacres perpetrated in Paris by the jihadis Chérif and Saïd Kouachi as well as Amedy Coulibaly and the massacres at the Bataclan and in Saint-Denis on November 13, 2015. These killings occurred a decade after the riots that shook French banlieues in October and November 2005. The commemoration also took place five years after the Arab uprisings of the winter of 2010–2011 in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria.
The slaughter at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and at the Hyper Cacher [Kosher] supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes in January 2015 and the killing of police officers Ahmed Merabet and Clarissa Jean-Baptiste were part of the recent tectonic upheavals experienced by French society as it entered the “retrocolonial” era. This era was characterized by the return of the North African repressed in French postcolonial history, and the seismic revolutions in the Arab world from North Africa to the Middle East. The explosion of terrorism in France, which burst out with the double Paris attacks of January 7–9, 2015 (the European equivalent of the “double raid” of September 11), was part of a series of jihadi assassinations that began with Merah’s killing spree in March 2012 and that lasted well into 2016, culminating in the Christmas market massacre of December 19 in Berlin. The reappearance of jihad on French territory, it having first emerged in 1995 and 1996 as a spillover from the Algerian jihad, caught the security forces off guard after sixteen years of successful security policy and was followed by a series of aftershocks that occurred throughout 2015 and 2016 and would spread in neighboring countries as well.
A series of incidents in 2015 and 2016 has made it abundantly clear that jihadism is firmly implanted in France. The fortuitous arrest of a jihadi suspected of having planned an attack on a church in April 2015, followed in June by the first decapitation in France (mimicking the abuses committed by ISIS in Syria and in Iraq) and then, in August, by a fortunately aborted shooting in a train, are all evidence of this. Such targeted attacks would follow suit in 2016 with the stabbing to death of a couple of policemen on June 13 in the outskirts of Paris and of an elderly priest performing his morning mass in a Normandy church on July 26. Moreover, several hundred French men and women have left to join the “caliphate” in the Levant, and in 2016, more than 1,500 of them were in the process of leaving or returning. Most of them were descendants of postcolonial Muslim immigrants, with the proportion of converts, whether young men or young women, being on the order of one out of every three or four.
Such figures force us to consider this terrorism unprecedented as an index of the French malaise and the inability of the political and economic elites to control social transformations. The irruption of jihadism, behind which looms the implantation of Salafism—a model for breaking with the values of the Republic and its secularism—is not an isolated phenomenon—and later jihadi developments in Belgium and Germany showed that it is not exclusively French. The far- right National Front’s electoral successes and the invasion of the Web by sites appealing to ethnic identity and conspiracy theories, of which Alain Soral is the ideologist and Dieudonné the figurehead, constitute parallel “French fractures,” from the housing projects to suburban homes. And in Germany, though the social environment is better than in France, with far less unemployment, we can observe a parallel rise of a strong extreme-right antimigrant and anti-Islam party—Alternative für Deutschland—which won a landslide in all elections following the 2015 arrival of more than a million Middle East refugees on German soil.
Nevertheless, the French case is stronger and deeper if we want to illustrate the paradigm of the rise of jihad in the West. During the decade between the three-week banlieue riots of autumn 2005 and the waves of jihadi attacks starting in January 2015, that country witnessed the deepening of new fault lines. The young people born in France to families that were part of the postcolonial immigration constituted the main symbolic stake. Among them, modes of violent confrontation with society and its institutions appeared, though the political expression of their aspirations or frustrations was not limited to these confrontations. However, the latter, which took various forms ranging from riots to jihad, constructed these youth as the media hostages of a kind of stigmatization. We shall see that this stigmatization fed, in turn, a siege-mentality fantasy of “Islamophobia.” Paradoxically, this decade also corresponds to another, more widespread kind of behavior based on the opposite view: the entry of this new generation into French citizenship and into the electorate.
For the first time since the population group constituted by immigrants of Muslim extraction settled in France, it was participating in a significant way in elections, not only by voting in large numbers but also by proposing hundreds of candidates for various offices. In addition, in 2007 it involuntarily helped elect as president Nicolas Sarkozy—the former minister of the interior at the time of the disturbing riots in 2005. These riots were vigorously repressed, and Sarkozy benefited from the support of far-right voters, thus easily defeating his rival, the socialist Ségolène Royal, who won most of the first-time voters from the banlieues.
Conversely, the narrower victory won by Socialist François Hollande when he ran for president against incumbent Sarkozy in 2012 benefited from the support of more than 80 percent of voters who told pollsters that they were “Muslims” and who opposed his adversary and predecessor because of his controversial statements about immigration and Islam.
France has experienced intense social upheaval throughout the twentieth century—despite the strength of its national identity, which is built upon grand Jacobin and Napoleonic narratives that can be traced back to the era of the absolute monarchy. Such confrontations sustained a Communist Party that was one of the most powerful in Western Europe and that was the vector for a counterculture of class struggle that transformed working-class banlieues into Red bastions. At its apogee, the French Communist Party spoke for the members of the “proletariat,” holding out the utopian promise of a radiant future while at the same time managing municipalities, labor unions, youth movements, and charitable organizations as well as seeing to it that its managers were upwardly mobile. But the French Communist Party did not survive the upheavals that occurred during the last quarter of the twentieth century—foremost among them the fall of the USSR.
The end of industrial society and strongly unionized shift work, along with the rise of a service sector that stressed individual initiative as opposed to solidary (by contrast with low-skill factory labor), have made the “worker’s party” obsolete. Young people who are unemployed or who make a living in the informal economy and through various kinds of trafficking—of which there are a large number among children of immigrants and the “native” French poor alike—can no longer identify with the unionized “worker’s party.”
Instead, two kinds of protest movements have developed alongside one another: right-wing ethnic nationalism and Islamism as parallel conduits for expressing grievances. They both bear, as the French Communist Party used to do, a strong utopian element that restores a mythical dimension to a disastrous social reality by projecting onto it a utopia where those who are left behind today will triumph tomorrow. In this new version of the “radiant future,” the red flag has been replaced by the brown flag of authoritarian right-wing parties or by the green banner of the Prophet Muhammad. The conflicts that used to be standardized by class struggle ideology no longer oppose the proletariat to the bourgeoisie; rather, according to some, they pit the “true French” against the “globalized Empire” (an updated reminder of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy of the 1930s), and according to others, they divide the world between righteous “Muslims” and hell-bound kuffar (“infidels” in Quranic Arabic).
These two worldviews redefine group memberships, solidarities, and enmities along lines that are not defined in terms of social class, even though they are fed by an obsessive fear of losing social status. The new “imagined communities”—to borrow from Benedict Anderson’s landmark book—to which those who adhere to these worldviews claim to belong, are transversal and heterogeneous. First of all, they revolve around moral certainties that are perceived as endangered and draw on a will to rebuild a code for the construction of a substitute ethics that the current political institutions, rife with corruption and compromises, lack.
The National Front has boasted that it is “France’s leading party” since it received the largest number of votes in the 2014 European Parliament elections and the December 2015 regional elections. Yet this party’s rhetoric does not entirely acknowledge that it is part of a more complex conglomeration. It includes organizations that urge a wider electorate to protest in the streets, as in the Manif pour tous (Demonstration for All) against the law authorizing same-sex marriage in 2014, and also a nebulous group that has emerged on the Internet and that is known as the Fachosphere (Fascist Web). Radical ethnic identity parties that call for all “native Frenchmen” to stand together against the “Muslim invasion” exist side by side with conspiracy theorists who seek to mobilize together true children of “our ancestors the Gauls” and “recent French people” (i.e., young French Muslims) against “Zionism” (i.e., Jews).
On the Islamic side we also find numerous generational, social, and political cleavages. Many groups are competing for influence over a population estimated to be 8 percent of France’s inhabitants, trying to transform it into a closely bound “community” defined by religious and cultural barriers. This population is younger and poorer than average and is endowed with an exceptionally dynamic demography. From the 2005 riots onward, it has also been growing, partially because of a new development: a flood of conversions among “native Europeans” from the declining working class and the frightened lower middle class.
For the present and the foreseeable future, this population group represents a considerable stake in society and a major source of votes in elections. However, it is unlikely that it will be able to incarnate the united “community” that Islamic political and religious entrepreneurs are relentlessly working on by pressing for cultural frontier markers—which have ranged, since the end of the 1980s, from wearing the Islamic veil to respecting halal diet and demonizing same-sex marriage.
In the mid-1980s, the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF), an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main international organization for political Islam, gained a primacy that it retained until the 2005 riots. Controlled by Arabic-speaking blédards (those who were born and bred in North Africa or the Levant), it made its hobbyhorse the fight for Muslim female students’ wearing of the veil in schools.
Having lost steam after the passage in 2004 of the law prohibiting the display of ostentatious religious signs in publicly funded schools and after the banlieues riots of 2005, the UOIF has since suffered strong competition from the Salafist movement in the battle for French Muslim minds. This “total” (in French, intégrale) view of the Muslim religion relies on a grand narrative promoting cultural separation from “infidel” French society. It recruits primarily among disenfranchised young people in the banlieues, where that blend of “total” Islam has become not only the norm in many places, multiplying ostensible markers in the urban fabric, but also a portentous habitus for their residents.
These two trends issue rules and prohibitions and construct representations of the world that challenge the established French identity. Movements whose purposes are more explicitly electoral prey on them, the most effective of which is Union des associations musulmanes du 93 (UAM 93), which advocates a strategy of religious lobbying in Seine-Saint-Denis, the first département in France to have a Muslim majority, according to UAM’s president. During the municipal elections in 2014, UAM 93 sought to take support away from the Socialist Party among voters in the disenfranchised housing projects by moving these voters to the right.
This shift has been aided by Islamic organizations’ participation, alongside French Catholic traditionalists, in the 2013 Manif pour tous against same-sex marriages and also by certain imams’ subsequent Friday sermons urging their followers to punish socialists for having become “corrupters on earth” by having authorized “homosexual marriage.” Although most of the faithful themselves had still voted for the left in the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2012, largely owing to their social position, in 2014 their support for the socialists crumbled, partly as a result of the persistence of the economic crisis but also because voting socialist now conflicted with moral-religious values.
Nonetheless, these children of Muslim immigrants were not limited to a hard choice between a social position that pushed them toward the left and an ethnic-religious affiliation that pushed them toward the right. Since the collapse of the Communist Party, the French working class as a whole has ceased to vote for the left and has allowed itself to be drawn into an identitarian1 vote for the far right. In 2015, polls indicated that the National Front had the highest number of blue-collar supporters. Moreover, in the 2012 parliamentary elections, some candidates who were children of colonial immigrants registered with the National Front or shared the conspiracy theory worldview advocated by far-rightists Alain Soral or Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala—whereas others condoned Islamist rhetoric.
The entrance of this generation into politics has a history that goes back far beyond the vicissitudes it experienced from 2005 to 2015. Its chronology begins with the founding myth of the “March for Equality and against Racism,” which the press dubbed the Marche des beurs (March of the Beurs—French banlieues backslang for Arabs) in autumn 1983. It was an initial attempt made by this new component of the French population to assert itself. The march came twenty-one years after Algerian independence—long enough for the generation of children born in France to Algerian parents to have reached adulthood.
Starting in the predominantly Algerian neighborhoods on the north side of Marseille, the march proceeded through the country, passing through Lyon and Roubaix and marking out a dispersed territory—the Algerian new France of the housing projects. The march sketched out an inverted mirror image of the lost French Algeria at the pivotal point between the former French Empire and what the retrocolonial era was to become. The March of the Beurs ended in Paris on December 3, 1983, with the presentation to President François Mitterrand, at the Élysée Palace, of demands for political participation. It issued from the heirs of the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN), regarding which he had declared, as minister of the interior, on November 5, 1954, just after the “Toussaint rouge,”2 that “the only negotiation is war” with the FLN.
At the outset, the march appealed to the ideal universals that the participants felt had been taken away from them, particularly as a result of police blunders committed during “hot summers” and imputed to “racial profiling” (délit de faciès), which resulted in several deaths during checks of identity papers or security incidents. Beyond this declared intention, as evidenced by its being called the “March of the Beurs,” it forcefully marked that ethnogeneration’s appearance on the French political stage.
For Mitterrand, the “only negotiation” this time was to be trickery. These young people, whose hybridization—illustrated by their use of banlieues backslang in referring to themselves—was supposed to guarantee them better integration into French society and assimilation to it, were not urged by the President and his advisors to join political parties. Instead, they were limited to serving as an audience for a spectacular politics associated with antiracism.
Mitterrand’s ruse was twofold: it consisted in broadly federating and publicizing the young people’s movement in order to stir and then stigmatize as racist the far right, whose rise in power was to divide the right wing and allow Mitterrand’s re-election as president in 1988. But it also consisted in diluting the marchers’ specific demands (particularly those connected with the pro-Palestinian affinities that some of them expressed by wearing Yasser Arafat’s checkered keffiyeh) in a broader antiracism in which French Jewish organizations played a driving role under the aegis of the organization SOS Racisme and its slogan “Touche pas à mon pote” (“Hands off my buddy”). We shall see how Mitterrand’s Machiavellian malediction has endured down to the present and has been exacerbated to the point that the far right is now established at the heart of French political life, in a position to win its bet. Moreover, the ousting from established politics and marginalization of the children of Muslim immigration would pave the way for Salafism and jihadism as a compensation.
The following pages are devoted to the study of this epochal change and the birth of jihad within France. First, we shall see how, between the pivotal years 2005 and 2012, a specifically French jihad was incubated even as a deep transformation of society took place almost unnoticed. The riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois in autumn 2005 gave birth to the third generation of French Islam at the same time when the third jihadi generation was emerging in the Middle East under the influence of Syrian ideologue Abu Musab al-Suri.
Born in reaction to the riots, Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency (2007–2012), which borrowed its political program from the far right, ended with the Merah affair—the test of the many jihadi attacks that would ensue. The intelligence services were unable to anticipate the latter’s combination of a foreign Islamist ideology conveyed through social networks and the new political sociology of the radicalized French Salafism.
Second, we will see how François Hollande, who benefited from the “Muslim vote” in the elections of May 2012, rapidly lost it because of the law authorizing same-sex marriage (Mariage pour tous), which triggered a Manif pour tous in which Catholics and Islamists paraded together, partly to support conservative values. But the loss of the Muslim vote was also due to the worsening of the economic crisis that was causing serious distress in the impoverished banlieues.
That would be a terrain favorable to the eruption of the French jihad in a society squeezed between the resistible ascension of the National Front and the thrust of a Salafism whose most radical elements, their eyes set on Syria and ISIS, advocate the destruction of Europe by civil war. And in that, the French case is not only significant for France as such: as developments in 2016 showed, it is becoming a paradigm that can help us decipher the in-depth dimension of the rise of jihad in the West as a whole.
1 Identitaire, a term referring to far-right politics that are based upon stressing native French identity and hostility to immigrants, particularly those of African descent.
2 “Red All-Saints’ Day,” a series of bloody attacks by FLN that took place in French Algeria on November 1, 1954. It is usually regarded as the beginning of the Algerian War for Independence.