Freedom of thought in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks

The Charlie Hebdo attacks on 7 January 2015 caused national and international outrage and widespread declarations of solidarity with the victims. This solidarity came to be expressed most clearly via the social media hashtag #JeSuisCharlie which spread across networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In this article, I initially focus on how reactions to the attacks were reflected by social media, exploring how it was difficult for individuals to articulate modes of condemnation which departed from the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ response. The second and main part of the article will focus on the freedom of thought of certain intellectuals whose voices were marginalised in the period following the attacks, arguably due to the fact their analyses of events challenged the binarism of the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response. The article seeks therefore to address the broader question of freedom of thought, as it is played out both in social media and in intellectual spheres, two domains which are becoming more closely intertwined as individual citizens and public intellectuals seek to understand major socio-political events with an increasing sense of immediacy. In particular, the notion of freedom of thought will be explored in relation to the other fundamental Republican ideals of modern citizenship: equality and fraternity. The article will ask to what extent these other principles were integrated into the individual and intellectual responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Within hours of the attacks, the most frequently used hashtag on Twitter became #JeSuisCharlie, as Joachim Roncin’s tweet was retweeted by millions of social media users. By the end of the week, the hashtag had been retweeted over seven million times (Wendling, 2015). This was clearly a very popular tweet, but according to technology and social media commentator Lance Ulanoff, the hashtag #WorldCupFinal, generated 32.1 million tweets during the football World Cup final in July 2014, and during the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, the hashtag #vote5sos, generated 78 million tweets. As Ulanoff shows, the activity surrounding #JeSuisCharlie is more comparable to tweets mentioning #Ferguson following the grand jury decision regarding the Michael Brown shooting (3.5 million in less than one day) (Ulanoff, 2015). Nevertheless, by the time of the ‘marche républicaine’, which brought together the president, ministers and foreign heads of state with around 1.6 million people in the streets of Paris, and approximately 3.5 million people across France, on 11 January, the main slogan for expressing solidarity with those murdered at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was #JeSuisCharlie. ¹ It has been argued by sociologist Monique Dagnaud that the slogan and the associated visual, created by Roncin, an artistic director working at Stylist magazine in Paris, was in part so extensively shared because the je of the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan appealed to the desire to express a certain subjectivity on the part of social media users, especially during the emotional phase of immediate reaction to the events (Dagnaud cited by Boinet, 2015). Indeed, as underlined by Sung and Hwang, some scholars regard social media ‘as a private public sphere’ because ‘it is not only a private space with a high level of personal involvement in posting material but also a public space that generates issues and influences public opinion’ (Sung and Hwang, 2014: 248 cite Choi and Han, 2011 and McCombs, 2004). Furthermore, social media researcher Christine Balagué has argued that sharing the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie had a socially legitimising function: ‘Relayer ce message nous donne un statut social, une légitimité dans le groupe’. Balagué also highlights that that the slogan is positive and that it was associated with ‘un mécanisme de défense. C’est un message de reconstruction … C’est un slogan qui crée un système combatif’ (Balagué cited by Boinet, 2015). Roncin, the creator of the slogan, argued that the fact that it mentions Charlie, a childlike, diminutive name rather than Charlie Hebdo, the magazine title, also helped to generate the high number of tweets: ‘Charlie c’est le pote sympa qu’on a tous envie d’avoir’ (Roncin cited by Boinet, 2015).

Drawing on the work of digital sociologist Karen Evans, we can argue that the ‘Je suis Charlie’ hashtag expressed an attempt to foster or re-think the notion of community as ‘a space(s) of hope and solidarity’ (Evans, 2013: 79), thus developing Manuel Castells’ position that such online networks can represent ‘major forms of sociability’ (Castells, 2001: 127). However, Evans argues that, paradoxically, despite the advent of Web 2.0 applications and increased possibilities for user-generated content and user-participation, rather than leading to the increased levels of agency among individuals, the technology has in many ways been used by ‘more dominant social and economic forces’ (Evans, 2013: 87). Indeed, Evans seeks to draw a distinction between what she describes as the early stage of the internet, which was characterised by the exchange of ideas among interest groups and the ‘image-conscious media of the late twentieth century’ (Evans, 2013: 88). More directly relevant to the theme of ‘Understanding Charlie’, is the research that has shown that as the internet has become more truly global in its reach, it has in many ways become ‘more local’ in character (Postill, 2008: 414), in that most individuals who post weblogs, status updates and tweets do so for their immediate small group of peers, family and friends: what has been termed a ‘nanoaudience’ (Evans, 2013: 89). Added to the erosion of notions of solidarity between groups in an age of neo-liberal late capitalism, the deterioration of intersubjective trust and decreasing non-virtual friendship circles, we are, as Robert Putnam put it in the title of his book about community ties, increasingly ‘bowling alone’ (Putnam, 2000). Building on Putnam’s notion of ‘bowling alone’, Evans draws our attention to the fact that the consequences of these phenomena, when coupled with the global economic crisis have involved the return of a certain communitarianism: ‘a distrust of the unknown, of the foreigner and of difference’ (Evans, 2013: 91).

It is thus to the flip side of the notion of solidarity and community as embodied by the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan that we now focus our attention. For it became difficult in the days following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo to express difference: different modes of thought and different modes of solidarity which departed from the ‘Je suis Charlie’ phrase. Indeed, those who questioned the notion of a consensus underlying the slogan were sometimes regarded with suspicion by their peers, the media and the political class, such was the force of the notion of ‘unité nationale’ underpinning the social media and ‘marche républicaine’ watchword. Furthermore, in the days following the attacks, there were multiple reports in the media that some pupils in schools across France refused to observe or disrupted the minute of silence in homage to the dead on 8 January. By 14 January, there were reports of 200 incidents of this nature (Le Nouvel Observateur, 2015). Forty of those incidents were reported to the police and the Ministry of Justice. Most notably, the case of an eight-year-old pupil who was interviewed by the police in Nice for refusing to observe the minute of silence and for claiming to be on the side of the terrorists was also symptomatic of a context in which dissent from the expected collective response would not be tolerated, above all when that dissent was articulated within schools – institutions which are generally regarded by the political class and society as embodying the values of the French Republic. The fact that a child was interviewed by the police in accordance with the offence ‘apologie du terrorisme’ signified that there had developed ‘un climat d’hystérie collective’, according to the boy’s lawyer, Sefen Guez Guez (Suc and Nunès, 2015). These attempts to mediate and monitor citizens’ responses to the attacks were, arguably, indicative of a discursive context resembling what Giorgio Agamben describes in State of Exception as follows: ‘The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself’ (Agamben, 2005: 4). And in relation to the post 9/11 or ‘global civil war’ (Agamben, 2005: 2) context, he shows that the state of exception takes on a particular significance: ‘the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government’ (Agamben, 2005: 14). Despite this apparent ‘generalization of the paradigm of security’, as exemplified by the monitoring of pupil reactions to the attacks, the Minister of Education claimed that the school had acted proportionately in signalling the case to the police and in initiating what was referred to as ‘un suivi pédagogique’ (Suc and Nunès, 2015). Indeed, the Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem (2015) proposed a number of initiatives which were designed to address the lack of identification that certain pupils felt with the ‘Je suis Charlie’ national ‘consensus’, the first of which would involve sending in specialised educational inspectors to assist and support teaching staff confronted with pupils who were deemed to be challenging the expected response. In order to make the government’s position clear, on 14 January the Ministry of Education published a press release which stated that the government would not tolerate any behaviour that challenged Republican values:

Comme la ministre l’a rappelé mardi 13 janvier aux recteurs et à l’ensemble des responsables académiques, l’éducation nationale ne laissera prospérer aucun comportement contraire aux valeurs de la République. (Ministère de l’éducation nationale, de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, 2015)

Of course, there were voices which expressed unease with the notion of ‘l’unité nationale’ and these were mainly academics and public intellectuals who questioned what they saw as the ‘unanisme’ and the confusion of emotional and political reactions to the events. On 15 January 2015 a collective of intellectuals (mainly historians, film critics, social scientists and philosophers), including Ludivine Bantigny, Emmanuel Burdeau, François Cusset, Cédric Durand, Eric Hazan, Razmig Keucheyan, Thierry Labica, Marwan Mohammed, Olivier Neveux, Willy Pelletier, Eugenio Renzi, Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc, Julien Théry, Rémy Toulouse and Enzo Traverso, published a joint letter in Le Monde, entitled ‘Non à l’union sacrée!’, arguing that the sincere sentiments of solidarity with the victims of the attacks had been hijacked by a range of cynical and hypocritical politicians who had attended the march on 11 January: ‘Voir des artistes abattus en raison de leur liberté d’expression, au nom d’une idéologie réactionnaire, nous a révulsés. Mais la nausée nous vient devant l’injonction à l’unanimisme et la récupération de ces horribles assassinats’ (Bantigny et al., 2015). The authors of the article are deeply critical of calls for unanimity by Prime Minister Manuel Valls and they point to other instances when his actions could be regarded as deeply divisive and in contradiction with that other pillar of Republican identity – fraternity:

‘Tout le monde doit venir à la manifestation’, a déclaré M. Valls en poussant des hauts cris sur la ‘liberté’ et la ‘tolérance’. Le même qui a interdit les manifestations contre les massacres en Palestine, fait gazer des cheminots en grève et matraquer des lycéens solidaires de leurs camarades sans-papiers expulsés nous donne des leçons de liberté d’expression … En France, la liberté d’expression serait sacrée, on y aurait le droit de blasphémer : blasphème à géométrie variable, puisque l’‘offense au drapeau et à l’hymne national’ est punie de lourdes amendes et de peines de prison. (Bantigny et al., 2015)

Other intellectuals to have expressed dissent in the face of the consensus and national unity supposedly conveyed in the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan include sociologist Nacira Guénif-Souilamas. Based at Université Paris VIII, Guénif is known for her work on the descendants of North African immigrants in contemporary France and she is one of a still rather limited number of scholars who adopts a Postcolonial Studies framework to examine the place of North African minorities in contemporary France. Guénif’s main contention is that the periodic problems which French society encounters with regards to its post-migrant North African population are more fully understood if it is acknowledged that French society is characterised by a ‘présent colonial’ whereby certain groups are systematically excluded from the proclaimed values of the Republic. In the aftermath of the January attacks, Guénif made two prominent public statements. The first of these was made as part of a collective of French social scientists writing for Médiapart and was an article entitled ‘Qu’est-ce que ça fait d’être un problème?’, published on 21 January 2015 and signed by Chadia Arab, Ahmed Boubeker, Nadia Fadil, Abdellali Hajjat, Marwan Mohammed, Nasima Moujoud, Nouria Ouali and Maboula Soumahoro. Guénif’s second intervention was made at a public panel discussion organised by the Union Juive Française pour la Paix on 14 February in Paris.

The Médiapart article argues against the more well-known responses to these types of atrocities committed in the name of Islam which either regard them as the manifestation of long-held fears about the Muslim ‘enemy within’ or, alternatively, maintain that while Islam cannot be held responsible for such acts of terror, it must nevertheless undertake a process of reformation in order to discredit the notion of political Islam or jihad. Guénif and her co-authors make the point that both these positions make a fundamental error in that it is not possible to refer to a ‘Muslim community’ in France, because of the sheer diversity in social origins and political and religious beliefs of such a sizeable population. And yet the calls on ‘les présumés musulmans’ to ‘désolidariser’ with the terrorists – that is to publically denounce the attacks (via the #notinmyname hashtags, for example) – belies any notion that Muslims in contemporary France make up a heterogeneous and diverse range of opinions and beliefs. Indeed, the expectation that French Muslims (the ‘good ones’) publically distance themselves with the terrorists is compounded by the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan, which takes on an almost confessional (in the sacred sense) quality among French Muslims, who, according to Guénif et al. (2015), are presumed not only to be Muslim, but also to be sympathetic at some level or other to the actions of the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly. The existence of such discourses in the public sphere is due mainly to the shift that has taken place in the public mind regarding the descendants of North African migrants, who have gone from being constructed as ‘immigrants’ to ‘Muslims’ in both the media and political landscapes. Guénif et al. argue that the emotional response to the January attacks led to a situation where it became difficult for a number of well-known social scientists who have been working on the question of the banlieues, youth and post-migrant trajectories to make themselves heard. According to Guénif and her co-authors, these social scientists (such as François Burgat, Olivier Roy, Farhad Khosrokhavar, Dietmar Loch, Vincent Geisser, Ahmed Boubeker, Samir Amghar, Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, Valérie Amiraux and Romain Caillet) were often sidelined and when they did speak, they were accused of political correctness or ‘angélisme’ because their analysis of the events focused mainly on socio-economic and structural causes which led to extreme forms of social exclusion and alienation among French-born citizens. As such, their material analysis of possible causes for radicalisation, which highlighted the effects of French state violence as expressed in the global war on terror and the social violence of inter-generational exclusion, discrimination and anomie among young people like the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly was not welcome (Guénif et al., 2015). Certainly, what seemed to be more visible in the mainstream media was commentary that minimised material analyses of the causes of the events and focused instead on more normative evaluations, premised on the importance of defending values such as freedom of expression and secularism. The analysis of figures like Alain Finkielkraut, Raphael Eindhoven or the essayist Caroline Fourest were arguably more normative than socio-political, and it was these voices that were more audible in the mainstream television media in the immediate aftermath of the debates. It could of course be argued that it was not morally appropriate in the days and weeks following the attacks to highlight the possible structural issues that had created a climate in which the Kouachi brothers and their accomplices could want to or be able to develop such plans.

However, some four months after the events, when historian and anthropologist, Emmanuel Todd’s book Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse was published, it appeared that it was still difficult for intellectuals to ask certain questions and above all to challenge the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response to events. In his book, Todd reveals his scepticism regarding the notion of national unity that underpinned the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response to events. He opens his book with the following statement:

Nous savons désormais, avec le recul du temps, que la France a vécu en janvier 2015 un accès d’hystérie. Le massacre de la rédaction du journal satirique Charlie Hebdo, de policiers et des clients d’un magasin juif ont provoqué une réaction collective sans précédent dans l’histoire de notre pays. En parler à chaud aurait été impossible. Les médias communiaient dans la dénonciation du terrorisme, dans la célébration du caractère admirable du peuple français, dans la sacralisation de la liberté et de la République. (Todd, 2015: 11)

Todd refers to the notion of ‘un flash totalitaire’ (Todd, 2015: 12) in that dissent to the national consensus surrounding events was, according to him, almost impossible: ‘Le gouvernement décrétait des sanctions. Tout refus par un lycéen d’observer la minute de silence décidée par le gouvernement était interprété comme une apologie implicite du terrorisme et un refus d’adhérer à la communauté nationale’ (Todd, 2015: 12). For Todd the ‘Je suis Charlie’ dynamic reflected a consensus about freedom of expression where what is held as sacrosanct is not only the right to blaspheme but the duty to blaspheme in order to prove oneself a ‘true’ or ‘good’ French citizen. The social and political pressure on Muslims to prove themselves to be good or true French citizens became entwined with the expectation that they also declare themselves to be ‘Charlie’:

Les journalistes politiques ne se contentaient pas d’écouter les imams et les Français musulmans de base qui leur affirmaient, comme tout le monde, que la violence était inacceptable, que les terroristes étaient infâmes et qu’ils trahissaient leur religion. Les journalistes exigeaient d’eux, comme de nous tous, qu’ils prononcent la formule rituelle, ‘Je suis Charlie’, désormais synonyme de ‘Je suis français’ … être français c’était, non pas avoir le droit, mais le devoir de blasphémer. (Todd, 2015: 12–13)

The main focus of Todd’s book is a demographic analysis of those regions and cities which took to the streets in the march on 11 January. A crucial aspect of Todd’s study is that on a conscious level, participants in the 11 January march were motivated by a sense of wanting to come together with other citizens to denounce the violence and to pay homage to the victims, but at an unconscious level, less progressive impulses were at play, namely conservatism, domination and inegalitarian values. Drawing on Durkheim’s definition of sociology as an academic discipline that goes beyond the conscious interpretations that people provide for their actions, Todd states with regards to the march on 11 January that: ‘Il faut aller plus loin et s’interroger sur les déterminants sociologiques de ces foules en état de communion spirituelle’ (Todd, 2015: 20). Todd thus argues that he adopts a similar approach to Durkheim in his seminal text Le Suicide, where he took into account broader statistical information about family status and spatial and temporal explanations for suicide, rather than focusing on individual suicide notes which may consciously attempt to explain the reasons for taking one’s own life. Todd’s analysis concentrates, then, on the latent motives that led between three and four million people to take to the streets on 11 January. Indeed, Todd notes that the other major Republican principle of equality (‘égalité’) was conspicuously absent in the reactions and the marches of 11 January: ‘La manifestation toutefois ne parlait pas de l’égalité’ (Todd, 2015: 19). ‘Le monde populaire n’était pas Charlie, les jeunes des banlieues, qu’ils fussent musulmans ou non, n’étaient pas Charlie, les ouvriers de province n’étaient pas Charlie’ (2015: 20). He thus concludes that those who went on the march predominantly belonged to the more dominant social classes in France and that such groups have abandoned the principle of equality:

aujourd’hui, les classes moyennes françaises, bien loin de porter les ‘valeurs positives de la nation’, sont fondamentalement égoïstes, autistes et d’humeur répressive … Et elles sont souvent, nous le verrons, plus proches du vieux fond catholique français que de la tradition laïque. (2015: 20)

Furthermore, Todd points out that the absence of the calls to equality were not coincidental, given that the editorial line of Charlie Hebdo had chosen to caricature the religion of those who are marginalised within French society:

Comment dire que … la condamnation de l’acte terroriste n’impliquait aucunement que l’on divinisât Charlie Hebdo. Que le droit au blasphème sur sa propre religion ne devait pas être confondu avec le droit au blasphème sur la religion d’autrui, particulièrement dans le contexte socio-économique difficile qui est celui de la société française actuelle. (2015: 15)

The lack of engagement with the principle of equality identified by Todd may be further illuminated by invoking Étienne Balibar’s notion of ‘equaliberty’. Indeed, Balibar claims that there is a tension or conflict between those principles which mark ‘the origin of modern universal citizenship’, namely equality and freedom (Balibar, 2014: 4). He argues that historically freedom is generally favoured by the dominant classes over equality. It would seem that Balibar’s analysis supports Todd’s claims in Qui est Charlie? It was precisely this productive unity of opposites (liberté and égalité) that seemed to be eroded in what Todd calls the ‘Charlisme’ of the aftermath of the attacks, since freedom and equality became disconnected from each other in the media and political reactions to the events. The focus on freedom (a principle historically associated with the dominant classes, according to Balibar) and the marginalisation of the principle of equality (historically favoured by the subaltern classes, according to Balibar) can ultimately be located in what Todd calls the sociology of religious crisis.

Todd’s main argument regarding the sociology of religious crisis is that due to its size and ‘metaphysical’ claims, the 11 January demonstration clearly indicates that France is affected by ‘une crise religieuse’ (Todd, 2015: 27). The nature of this religious crisis is illustrated, according to Todd, by the constant flow of Islamophobic rhetoric which has come to characterise French public life, as exemplified by Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission which was published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the success of Eric Zemmour’s Le Suicide français (2014) which laments the failed project of integration and was written by an author who, when interviewed by the Corriere della Sera, was quoted as saying that France should consider deporting Muslims. ² Todd’s understanding of France’s ‘crise religieuse’ has to do with the speed with which France shifted from being a predominantly Catholic society to a secular and largely atheistic one, a process which occurred roughly between 1960 and 1990. According to Todd, the sheer rapidity of such a religious and cultural transformation has engendered a range of unforeseen psychological and political consequences. Indeed, he argues that when religion or religiosity disappears or is considerably marginalised, this has often produced historically seismic effects as a result. He cites the French Revolution as following a preceding crisis of Catholicism or the rise of social democracy, and then Nazism in Germany following the decline in religiosity between 1880 and 1930. The point he is making is that when religion recedes on a societal level, new ‘replacement’ ideologies emerge to fill the void, and that often those ideologies are repressive in nature. The repressive ideology he is referring to as having emerged after the most recent period of de-Christianisation is a new hybrid form of European Unionist nationalism and neo-liberalism which operates on two levels: ‘l’un conscient et positif, libéral et égalitaire, républicain, l’autre inconscient et négatif, autoritaire et inégalitaire, qui domine et exclut’ (Todd, 2015: 87). He therefore concludes: ‘Nous devons prendre la religion au sérieux, particulièrement lorsqu’elle disparaît’ (2015: 33).

So, according to Todd, the new ideology which emerged after the de-Christianisation of France that took place between 1960 and 1990 is the belief in the power of capital, a certain understanding of the European project based on an obsession with the single currency – a transition he sums up in the phrase: ‘De Dieu unique à la monnaie unique’ (2015: 50). In addition, Todd’s main premise throughout the book is that the decline of Catholicism in modern France has led to the emergence of an anthropological and social dynamic that he and Hervé Le Bras, his co-author of Le Mystère français (2013), referred to in their earlier study as ‘le catholicisme zombie’ (2015: 55). For Todd, François Hollande embodies the archetypal ‘catholique zombie’, which has come to characterise the unacknowledged right-wing tendencies of the Parti socialiste – what he calls ‘un socialisme d’un genre nouveau’ (2015: 55), which is not concerned with the fundamental redistribution of wealth, or with egalitarian politics:

Le Parti socialiste devient peut-être au fond plus insensible, plus dur aux faibles que ne l’était la droite conservatrice. Le catholicisme social, lui, méprisait l’argent et encourageait chez les privilégiés le sentiment d’une responsabilité vis-à-vis des pauvres. Le culte socialiste de la monnaie unique nous mène au-delà d’une conception catholique de la société. (2015: 57)

In addition to the existence of a ‘catholicisme zombie’, which supposedly motivates people to behave politically in certain ways, Todd argues that with the decline of Catholicism, the defenders of atheism need a new adversary against which to define themselves – Islam:

La diabolisation de l’islam répond au besoin intrinsèque d’une société totalement déchristianisée. Nous ne pouvons sans cette hypothèse, comprendre la mobilisation de millions de laïcs défilant derrière leur Président catholique zombie pour défendre le droit absolu à caricaturer Mahomet. (2015: 65–6)

Ultimately, Todd’s answer to the question that frames his book Qui est Charlie? is that those who identified themselves in the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan were ‘cadre, supérieur et catholique zombie’ (2015: 69). According to Todd, the widespread presence of dominant social groups was illustrated by the fact that the 11 January march was concerned with the affirmation of a certain sense of social power: ‘objectif atteint en défilant en masse derrière son gouvernement et sous le contrôle de sa police’ (2015: 87). The attachment to inegalitarian and authoritarian values is what characterises neo-Republicanism, which unlike Republicanism (based on egalitarianism) is quite similar to Catholicism and emerges from ‘le catholicisme zombie’. Todd claims that this explains why there was relatively little outrage regarding the anti-Semitic aspects of the attacks, and he quotes Marcela Iacub who wrote in Libération on 23 January that: ‘Il y a eu dans les commémorations des victimes du terrorisme quelque chose de très gênant: la place presque inexistante octroyée aux morts juifs’ (2015: 105).

Todd himself argues that his book is not a standard academic publication and was written in a more polemical style and tone. And indeed, despite his use of longitudinal statistical data to back up his claims about the unconscious sociological motivations of those who rallied around the ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement, in places Todd’s conclusions appear overly deterministic. For example, his categorisation of formerly Catholic and formerly Protestant regions across France and Europe in terms of family structure and their political behaviours seems overly static. Furthermore, it would appear to be a curious approach for an anthropologist, given that this discipline tends to focus on lived experience and everyday practices rather than intergenerational sociological and political ‘characteristics’. Nevertheless, I do not seek here to assess Todd’s own arguments and their merits but rather to focus on the extraordinary polemic that ensued after the publication of his book. I would argue that the level of media and political scrutiny of Todd’s book itself possibly reveals something of the ‘flash totalitaire’ climate that Todd refers to.

The reaction to Todd’s book has been extremely negative and regular current affairs commentators such as Alain Finkielkraut and Caroline Fourest were quick to condemn Todd’s analysis. Speaking on la Radio de la Communauté Juive (RJC) on 3 May 2015, Finkielkraut described Todd’s claims in the following terms: ‘Tout cela [qui] n’est que haine et mépris’ (Radio RJC, 2015). In addition, Finkielkraut argues that those who think of themselves as left-wing have lost their way: ‘la gauche devient démente’ (Radio RJC, 2015). When interviewed for the Cité du Livre programme on La Chaîne Parlementaire (2015), Caroline Fourest, the author of another widely publicised ‘post-Charlie’ book, Éloge du Blasphème (2015), was also extremely critical of Todd’s analysis. Not only does she question the methodological soundness of the book, she utterly refutes Todd’s claims that the 11 January march was xenophobic: ‘Quand des gens défilent derrière des slogans fraternels, antiracistes, pour soutenir des victimes de terrorisme, je ne sais pas qui il est pour dire de ces gens-là qu’ils sont xénophobes et racistes’ (La Chaîne Parlementaire, 2015).

Beyond Finkielkraut’s and Fourest’s reactions, further examples of the tone of the media reaction to Todd’s book are indicated by the following headlines: ‘Qui est Charlie: Emmanuel Todd, quand un intellectuel perd les pédales’ (Szafran, 2015); ‘Emmanuel Todd: mieux vaut croire qu’il est malade’ (Matouk, 2015); ‘Emmanuel Todd, intellectuel zombie’ (Macé-Scaron, 2015); ‘Le débat Manuel Valls – Emmanuel Todd ou le naufrage des intellectuels’ (Saint Clair, 2015). The fact that these articles that dismissed Todd’s analysis as fantasy and delusion came from both sides of the political spectrum demonstrates fairly clearly the disquiet that Todd’s critique of France’s so-called neo-Republican metaphysical crisis provoked on both ‘left’ and ‘right’. As Todd himself bitterly claimed in an interview with Inrocks TV on 29 May 2015: ‘l’esprit du 11 janvier pour des mecs comme moi c’est “ferme ta gueule”’ (Inrocks TV, 2015). Todd’s sense that he could not voice his concerns in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and march, coupled with such a heightened reaction against his book four months after the events, to some extent confirms his assessment.

For those who broke with the media and political consensus, the stakes were high, as demonstrated when the Prime Minister Manuel Valls intervened in the debate and wrote a personal response to Todd’s book. In an article published in Le Monde on 7 May 2015, Valls responds directly to Emmanuel Todd’s thesis advanced in Qui est Charlie? and attacks intellectuals who are, in his view, too inclined to engage in national self-critique:

faut-il noircir le tableau, céder à l’autoflagellation? C’est un fait: notre nation, chahutée par les bouleversements du monde, connaît une forme de dépression, elle-même alimentée par les diagnostics réguliers d’intellectuels. Ceux-ci, bien que venus d’horizons différents, se retrouvent dans un même constat: celui du déclin. Un constat devenu une véritable idéologie, un leitmotiv. Trop souvent, notre nation ne sait plus s’émerveiller d’elle-même. Le devoir des responsables politiques est alors, aussi, de descendre dans l’arène des idées, de répondre, de combattre les faux-semblants. (Valls, 2015)

Valls uses Todd’s own description of the 11 January march as an ‘imposture’ in order to refute his claims on four fronts. The first concerns the idea that the march was somehow Islamophobic. In his rejection of Todd’s analysis, he appeals to the notion of viscerally experienced values and to the legacy of Ernest Renan. Given the somewhat nostalgic tone of the extract below it is arguable that Valls’ stance is indicative of what Alain Badiou calls ‘le fétichisme républicain’ (Médiapart, 2015):

Il fallait entendre cette Marseillaise chantée spontanément dans tous les cortèges pour saisir cet attachement viscéral aux valeurs qui nous unissent, au-delà de nos désaccords politiques, de nos appartenances culturelles; un attachement à ce qui fait la nation républicaine, son caractère profondément consensuel et contractuel qu’Ernest Renan a si bien démontré. (Valls, 2015)

The second imposture that Valls identifies in Todd’s analysis concerns the issue of freedom of expression. Valls calls for intellectuals to exercise some responsibility in their analysis of events, which is striking given that those who argue that cartoonists should exercise ‘responsibility’ or cultural sensitivity towards religious or ethnic minorities were often dismissed as being ‘politically correct’:

La deuxième imposture tient à la définition de la liberté d’expression. Sur ce point, face aux confusions dangereuses, notamment au sein de notre jeunesse, les intellectuels ont une responsabilité éminente: éclairer et non pas tout mélanger …Elle [la caricature] est le plus souvent, n’en déplaise à Emmanuel Todd, du côté des ‘faibles’ et des ‘discriminés’. (Valls, 2015)

It is significant that in what he presents as his defence of caricature, Valls places inverted commas around the terms used by Todd: ‘les faibles’ et ‘les discriminés’. On the one hand, Valls could be seen as simply quoting Todd, since these are the terms which he himself uses to critique Charlie Hebdo, but on another level, it suggests that Valls does not take such terms entirely seriously.

The third ‘imposture’ of which Valls accuses Todd is his concept of the ‘néo-République’. Valls disqualifies Todd’s concept in the following terms: ‘La troisième imposture, c’est cette théorisation d’une néo-Republique, concept pour le moins brumeux’ (Valls, 2015). As for the claim by Todd that the 11 January march embodied a politically regressive mixture of anti-dreyfussard and vichyiste sentiment, Valls responds: ‘L’historien ne prend alors plus de prudence avec sa discipline, au point de devenir inquiétant’ (2015).

The fourth imposture that Valls identifies in his article concerns Todd’s evaluation of the left. Valls dismisses Todd’s analysis as being tainted with a sort of ambiant populism and of being obsessed with the notion of contestation and ‘le mythe révolutionnaire’. Valls ends his piece with a sort of plea to Todd and other intellectuals who may be tempted to endorse his analysis of the Charlie Hebdo events:

Je réponds, ici, à Emmanuel Todd, mais je ne réponds pas qu’à lui. Le plus inquiétant dans ses thèses, c’est qu’elles participent d’un cynisme ambiant, d’un renoncement en règle, d’un abandon en rase campagne de la part d’intellectuels qui ne croient plus en la France. J’aimerais que plus de voix s’élèvent pour défendre notre pays, pour mieux en penser les défis, pour relever l’étendard de l’optimisme. (Valls, 2015)

The fact that a politician – the Prime Minister – was moved to respond directly to Todd’s book and to publically refute his analysis and his concepts is a highly significant and political gesture. Indeed, it indicates how the post-Charlie context did resemble a discursive state of emergency where, ironically, the very principle of freedom (of thought and expression) came under considerable strain.

To conclude: the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan which emerged to express solidarity with the victims of the attacks on 7 January and to defend the notion of the freedom of expression arguably catalysed into a mechanism for the articulation of a certain vision of ‘Frenchness’ in a discursive context resembling what Giorgio Agamben describes in State of Exception (2005). The post-Charlie state of exception required ‘good French citizens’ to side with Charlie Hebdo’s editorial line, and required ‘good French intellectuals’ to selectively focus on the consequences regarding Republican norms and values: liberté [d’expression] and laïcité (rather than égalité and fraternité) and the perceived threat to their survival. In addition, the discursive state of exception also discredited those intellectual voices that focused on the material and geo-political conditions that created the circumstances that could lead to such atrocities. Most significantly, the fact that the Prime Minister intervened in the debate, following the publication of Todd’s Qui est Charlie? in order to encourage the ‘right’ sort of intellectual response was the clearest demonstration of a discursive state of exception that seeks to limit freedom of thought.

Finally, the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the ambiguities identified by Todd and others may be further illuminated by invoking Étienne Balibar’s notion of ‘equaliberty’ as a useful way to think further about citizenship after Charlie Hebdo. The focus on defending freedom of expression at all costs as opposed to a dialogic (or fraternal) freedom of expression, coupled with the invisibility of égalité in the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response meant that the productive ‘unity of opposites’, the ‘combination of conflict and institution’ that underpins what Balibar calls the ‘trace of equaliberty’ (Balibar, 2014: 4) did perhaps become obscured in the immediate aftermath of the events. ³