Ten years after the 2015 attacks, France still in shock

UA decade has passed, but France has never been the same again. The jihadist attacks of January 7, 8 and 9, 2015, in Paris and Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), constituted, for the “homeland of human rights”, a shock of comparable violence, all things considered. , to that of September 11, 2001 for the United States. In France, it was not a symbol of financial power that was targeted, but a priceless, fundamental double heritage, that of freedom of expression and that of the right of French Jews to live in peace in their country.

During these three terrible days, three Islamist terrorists, all French, eager to “avenge the prophet Mohammed”murdered 17 people with weapons of war. In the premises of Charlie Hebdoon the morning of January 7, the carnage left 12 victims including eight members of the newspaper team, popular personalities, emblematic of the French tradition of satire and free criticism of all forms of thought, including religious . The next day, a municipal police officer was shot near a Jewish school, probably targeted by her attacker. Then, on January 9, four customers of the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes, targeted because they were Jewish, were killed in cold blood.

The explosion of January 2015 would have been less surprising if the tragic signal that had been heard, in 2012, was the massacre committed by another Islamist terrorist in the Toulouse region, fatal to three soldiers and then to four Jewish people, including three children of the Ozar-Hatorah school. It nevertheless constitutes “a pivotal date in the seriousness of terrorist attacks, but also in the export of jihad to Europe”according to former Paris prosecutor François Molins.

Since then, from the Parisian Bataclan hall to the Stade de France (Seine-Saint-Denis), from Nice to Magnanville (Yvelines) and from Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime) to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines) ) and Arras, the country has never ceased to be confronted with this “absolute barbarism” denounced by the president of the assizes responsible for judging the assassination of Samuel Paty, professor of history and geography murdered in 2020.

Daily vigilance

Of exceptional scale and apparent unanimity, the demonstrations organized in response to the attacks of January 2015 seem very distant. Certainly, and this is already immense, under these multiple blows, France has resisted the temptation of exceptional laws and violence between communities. Justice convicted the killers' accomplices during exemplary trials. But how can we not compare the shocks caused by the repeated carnage committed by radicalized French people to the electoral successes of an extreme right which has made its honey from the amalgamation between immigration and Islamism?

How can we not deplore that “I am Charlie” have left room for relativism on freedom of expression and the right to blasphemy, particularly among younger generations? How can we not notice that these repeated tragedies and their often cynical political exploitation have only widened the divide on secularism, a historically left-wing value that the right and the far right are trying to appropriate? How can we not be alarmed by the concerns and the feeling of isolation that French Jews feel in the face of the rise in anti-Semitic acts and expressions too often tolerated under the pretext of criticism of Israel?

Beyond the essential duty of memory towards the victims, the anniversary of the 2015 attacks should serve as a reminder of the fragility of the universalist heritage of the Enlightenment. Neither freedom of expression – in particular that of press cartoons – nor the principle of secularism, which respects religions but imposes itself on them and allows living together, nor the rule of law, which subjects incriminations under the law, are not definitive achievements. These are values ​​that require daily vigilance and the mobilization of all.