Emmanuel Todd, a left-wing historian, sociologist and political scientist who works at the National Institute of Demographic Studies in Paris, ruffled feathers in his native France when his Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse was published earlier this year. It elicited such a furore that the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, felt compelled to intervene, taking to the pages of Le Monde to issue a terse rebuttal of the book’s thesis. Thanks to Polity Press and translator Andrew Brown, English readers can now join in the ruckus. Todd proposes that the mass demonstrations of 11 January 2015, in which the French public took to the streets to condemn the terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, were not the benign humanist gesture t