France is a resilient nation

Le Monde – January 10, 2015 –

Faced with the barbaric acts committed in Paris, the French people are capable of finding, in the face of adversity, the means to rise again. And to show solidarity. No party should be excluded, not even the National Front.

France has undoubtedly just experienced one of its most powerful traumas since the Second World War. First, through the assassination of an entire newspaper editorial team, one of our most dearly acquired values was being destroyed: freedom of expression. To this horrific act, the French did not respond with fear, despondency, or passive anger. On the contrary, they are responding with an immense patriotic outcry. Tens of millions of us observed a minute's silence on Thursday, January 8. Demonstrations in support of Charlie Hebdo are spontaneously multiplying across cities, and social media is swamped with chains of solidarity and calls to fight religious obscurantism. This momentum transcends all political and religious divides, something that has not happened for a very long time. Thus, for example, the main Muslim organization and the most identitarian, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), which had filed a lawsuit against Charlie Hebdo when the caricatures of Muhammad were published, immediately condemned the massacre in the strongest terms and called on its members to join the marches in support of the newspaper and freedom of expression. All political parties mobilized in this regard, and it is deplorable that the handful of deputies who organized the large demonstration on Sunday, January 11, refused to allow the National Front to participate. My ideas are the opposite of those of this party, but I wonder why, in such a precious moment of solidarity and national unity, they wanted to break this momentum by excluding one of the main French political parties?

The terror, alas, continued with the assassination of a policewoman in Montrouge and the new deadly attack that has just been committed against the Jewish community in Vincennes, which has become a permanent target of these jihadists. Some also choose to respond violently to these terrorist acts, as evidenced by the burning of mosques, creating an unfair conflation between Islam and Islamist fanaticism. There is no religious war, nor civilization. There is a confrontation between those who are civilized, whatever their religious or ethnic affiliation, and individuals or groups who are no longer civilized, and who have sometimes even lost all sense of humanity.

When an individual experiences a powerful traumatic shock, they can collapse. They can also fight back and find new strength in the ordeal that will help them not only get back on their feet, but sometimes also grow and surpass themselves. We call this resilience. We can apply this concept to people. The French, who seemed so depressed, resigned, and more divided than ever, are mobilizing—beyond all political, social, and religious divides—to reject the dictatorship of terror and defend the core values of our Republic: freedom of expression and the acceptance of diversity of thought and belief. Although deeply shocked by these acts of barbarism, they respond with a desire to show solidarity and to say loud and clear "no" to all forms of deadly violence. The French have therefore chosen resilience.

This series of traumatic criminal acts that have shaken us up cannot mask the positive and constructive reaction of a very large majority of our fellow citizens. After the grief and anger, we want to believe in our common destiny, to strongly reaffirm the humanist thought stemming from the Enlightenment that underpins the laws of the Republic and that transcends our borders. The many victims of this series of attacks did not die in vain.