Envoy: Adieu to France?

Summary

At the end of this journey into theory and the new antisemitism, as once again I stand glued to the news in the aftermath of the carnage perpetrated by the Islamic State on November 13, 2015, in the heart of Paris, I wish to add a few words on the most recent theory that has emerged on the new antisemitism and its relationship to Islamophobia.

In the aftermath of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, sociologist Emmanuel Todd published a demographic study of the response to terrorism. Todd focused on the sociological and cultural background of the large population that paid tribute to the victims of Charlie Hebdoby marching en masse on January 14, 2015. Insofar as Todd's methodology and results have been compellingly contested by social scientists, I believe that it is more useful to focus on his insights and blunders, than it is to join those who have questioned his empirical method. Todd's purpose was to question the “Je suis Charlie” consensus and to suggest that reactionary, racist, and Islamophobic forces underlie the support for the satirical weekly. Despite the claim of its author, Qui est Charlie?is not a scientific book. It is an attempt at delegitimizing those who have expressed grief over the death of the cartoonists (French cult figures henceforth considered as free speech martyrs) and attachment to satire and the French anticlerical tradition. Although Todd's book is best characterized as a manifesto against Islamophobia, and against a French neo-secularism supposedly haunted by a racist and anti-Semitic unconscious (what Badiou called pétainisme transcendantal). Despite its polemical character I believe that it contains a couple of worthy propositions.

Against Todd's allegation that Charlieis a journal “specializing in the stigmatization of Islam” (24) (an allegation typical of those who, after the terrorist attacks, were prompt to blame the victims), I would argue that Charlie Hebdohas never been a reactionary and Islamophobic journal but an equal-opportunity offender. If Charlie's trademark had been Islamophobia, then a mass movement of support for Charliecould perhaps be construed as Islamophobic. But such was never the case. Todd must bend reality—in this case, Charlie's ideology—and blame the victims in order to fit a theory that can be summed up as follows: the France that took to the streets on January was reactionary and racist France.