Before becoming Prime Minister, he was Minister of the Interior during all the years when France faced some of the deadliest terrorist attacks in its history. Bernard Cazeneuve returns for us to the crisis of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks which he managed on the front line at Place Beauveau in 2015.
What is your state of mind as we commemorate ten years since the Charlie Hebdo attack?
I was Minister of the Interior during all these years when our country faced terrorist attacks, among the deadliest in its history.
After the crimes of Toulouse and Montauban, France was faced with a real race against time: while the level of the threat was unprecedented, we needed, to protect the Nation, to significantly increase, and within a very short time, the resources of the security and intelligence services, significantly reduced by the general review of public policy, implemented between 2007 and 2012.
It was also necessary to modernize the law on intelligence which dated from 1991, that is to say from a time when neither the internet nor mobile phones yet existed, and to strengthen cooperation between the intelligence services of the European Union. , in order to better control entries at the external borders of the Schengen area.
When the attacks of January 2015 occurred, France was plunged into grief and experienced the feeling that we wanted to reach its foundations – in its love of freedom in particular – with the desire to make it bend.
But our country will find in it the strength to remain standing by affirming in the eyes of the world, on January 11, 2015, its unity around the values of the Republic.
How did you manage this crisis as Minister of the Interior?
My obsession was to get out of the crisis by neutralizing the terrorists as quickly as possible. This required perfect coordination of the interventions of the internal security forces, in very close liaison with the prosecutor François Molins to whom I was linked by a relationship of great trust.
Surrounded by the big bosses of the internal security forces and the intelligence services in the so-called Fumoir room, Place Beauvau, I focused on the objective while continuously informing the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister of the state of progress of operations, as well as the French to whom we owed the truth. This strategy allowed us to overcome the crisis with immense sadness in my heart, which has never left me since.
What image do you keep of it?
I will never forget the look of the BRI and Raid police officers, whose faces were hidden by their hoods, after their intervention to free the hostages from the Hyper Cacher grocery store.
Everything then testified to their courage, their pride in having saved lives, the sense of duty accomplished, but also their great humility, despite the bravery which they had shown collectively a few minutes before.
I felt immense and definitive gratitude for them and for all those who risk their lives to save those of our compatriots.
When on January 11, the French applauded from the windows of Paris the police and gendarmes who had protected them and would continue to protect them, I was moved to tears.
Samuel Paty and Dominique Bernard have since died, have we learned enough lessons from the Charlie attacks?
Successive governments, after 2017, did what they had to to maintain a level of vigilance commensurate with the threat, even if they sometimes gave the feeling that it all started with them.
I think that the intellectual and moral rearmament of our country, in the face of Islamist totalitarianism, must be amplified and that secularism, which makes the school a sanctuary, must be defended in an uncompromising manner by the Republican State.
No teacher should henceforth find themselves in a position to renounce their teachings, for the sole reason that they might find themselves threatened for wanting to conscientiously accomplish their mission. If this order cannot be defended and respected, then the entire Nation will be threatened in its unity and indivisibility.
Is the risk of terrorism more significant than ever?
The developments that have taken place in Afghanistan, and more recently in Syria, and the unrest that remains in the Sahel, could be at the origin of new threats, which we must take a lucid look at.
However, the work accomplished over the last ten years to increase the means of internal security and intelligence forces allows France to be better armed than it was in the face of the terrorist challenge.
