The night that changed France – and Europe

The Vatican has described the atrocities of Friday 13 November as an assault on peace for all humanity. They have also caused a rethink about security, freedom and open borders

It began at 9.20 p.m. on Friday at the Stade de France during the France-Germany football match, and ended just after midnight at the Bataclan concert venue, via two restaurants, two bars and a cafe: a killing spree that left 129 people dead and hundreds more injured. And in its wake, the events of Friday night not only traumatised the people of France but left the nation and the rest of Europe in crisis. The attacks, soon claimed by Islamic State (IS) as an assault against Paris, “the capital of prostitution and obscenity” as it described it, have broken families, thrown the spotlight of suspicion on Muslims and refugees, challenged policies on migration and the role of the Western world in the Middle East but also caused politicians to reconsider security in their own countries. The grief-stricken but defiant French have said that they must continue to stand up for their traditional values of liberty, equality and fraternity. But in the aftermath of Paris, the consequences for freedom, for alliances and for politics throughout Europe are profound.

Friday night was not the first time that France has been the target of savage attacks. On 7 January 2015, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a vigorous critic of Islam, was attacked by two brothers who forced their way into its Paris offices and shot dead 12 people, injuring 11 more. A further five people were killed in the days that followed, including at a Jewish supermarket. But on 13 November came the realisation that IS can stage far larger and bloodier attacks than first assumed. Intelligence experts said after Charlie Hebdo that IS used “lone wolves” for random attacks and this was the biggest threat. In fact, it emerged over the months after the January attacks that there was a great deal of co­ordination. And when the attacks broke out on Friday, with heavily armed and clearly well-trained militants hitting several different locations, it was clear that IS is capable of full-scale operations. This brought home to the French the reality of what it means to have young French people travelling to Syria for military-style and terrorist training.

That Friday also exposed how easy it is for dangerous people to cross borders in Europe. The Paris public prosecutor François Molins said that the attacks were carried out by three coordinated teams, all wearing pseudo-­military black clothing, carrying explosives and Kalashnikov rifles. Of the attackers who died in Friday’s aftermath, all are French, bar one, who was carrying a Syrian passport which may be fake, while three, including two brothers, were French nationals living in Belgium, and three had travelled back and forth between Europe and Syria in recent months. At the time of going to press, one of the Belgian residents, Salah Abdeslam, is on the run after being involved in the attack on the Bataclan concert hall. He was recorded crossing the border from France back into Belgium on the morning after the attacks, but was not arrested. The field commander, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was believed to be behind the attacks, was Belgian of Moroccan extraction. At least one of the killers, Omar Ismail Mostefai, has links through his father to Algeria, the country where France conducted its savage imperial war from 1956 to 1962. So too did Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who killed the Charlie Hebdo journalists.

France’s Muslim population is estimated at up to 5 million, or about 7.5 per cent of the population, making Islam the country’s ­second-largest religion after Catholicism. Two-thirds of them are French citizens, many born and educated there. Their ethnic backgrounds are mostly North African Arab, but also Western African and Turkish. Certainly a significant number are of Algerian parentage and many of them live in the run-down banlieues on the outskirts of the capital.

Several countries, especially Algeria, Morocco and Turkey, keep close ties to these French diasporas by supporting mosques, providing imams (many of whom don’t speak French) and playing politics behind the scenes. These divisions have crippled the officially backed French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and hampered efforts to integrate the religion into modern French life.

The expansion of Wahhabi literalism has further fractured Islam in France. This ultra-strict movement encourages followers to reject not only other faiths but also more tolerant Muslims. It is often called Salafist, a broader theological term, but Wahhabi is also used to highlight the Saudi petrodollar power behind its expansion.

The long and tortured history of colonial rule over Muslims in Algeria and France’s insistence that Muslims all but give up Islam – according to the way Islamists see it – in order to live in France has caused a long-running sore of resentment and alienation among its Muslim population. Some of the young men who have heard stories of Algerian atrocities and seen their mothers and sisters forced to remove their veils in public under a law passed in 2011 have become prey to the Salafists who reject the free and open Western way of life as impious and deserving to be destroyed.

In France, they have a country that flaunts all the possibilities of Western freedoms, with its open treatment of sex, alcohol, luxury and other pleasures. Last but not least, it is bombing Syria while being geographically closer than the traditional enemy America and more accessible than other anti-IS powers such as Britain or Russia.

France’s president, François Hollande, responded to the attacks by both ordering further bombings by French forces of Syria and also declaring that his country was now engaged in a war. The theory that post-Cold War conflicts will be between people’s cultural and religious identities has been promulgated since Samuel P. Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. Interestingly, the idea was first used by that veteran of French Algeria, Albert Camus, but Hollande, in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks, went further. “France is not engaged in a war of civilisations,” he told a joint meeting of the lower and upper houses of the French parliament, “because those assassins don’t represent any civilisation.” Instead he described the perpetrators as “nihilists”.

Rachida Dati, the former Justice Minister in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande’s predecessor in the Elysée Palace, and of Muslim extraction, appeared to take a somewhat similar approach to Hollande, suggesting in a television interview on Monday night that the problem is not one of religion but one of crime. France had made a mistake, she said, focusing on faith.

Certainly, in the days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the response was to promote more understanding and teaching of laïcité, the separation of Church and State in France that dates back to 1905, while being discreet about one’s personal belief is considered a part of being French – in sharp contrast to ideas of being Muslim.
Laïcité can also be used as a mask for anti-Muslim discrimination. The attacks in Paris took place against a background of the intertwined problems of the conflict in Syria and the refugee crisis. Not that the French were ever particularly enthusiastic about refugees, and they reciprocated by opting to move to more welcoming countries such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries. The large numbers in Calais are an exception because it is a jumping-off point for Britain.

With regional elections coming up, the issue of “otherness” – whether the people are French nationals with different skin colour and different religion, or recently arrived refugees – will loom large. Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, presents herself as a defender of laïcité when she and others (including Sarkozy) say state school cafeterias should not have halal meals especially provided for Muslim pupils. Some even want to get rid of vegetarian plates, the default alternative for Muslims and Jews if there is meat – especially pork – on the menu. Although campaigning in next month’s regional elections, in which Le Pen’s party is expected to win control of the regions of northern France/Picardy, containing Calais and Amiens, and Provence/Côte d’Azur including Nice and Marseilles, has been suspended, this did not stop her stating that “France and the French are no longer safe” and that “Islamist fundamentalism must be annihilated, France must ban Islamist organisations, close radical mosques and expel foreigners who preach hatred in our country as well as illegal migrants who have nothing to do here”.  

There is tough talk from Nicolas Sarkozy too, since he knows that is what he needs to keep wooing voters, angry and in mourning, who might otherwise veer further to the Right. Rachida Dati, meanwhile, expanded the issue to take in the future of Europe, arguing that France’s precious liberty was in peril because of Europe’s open borders. “If there’s no security, there’s no freedom,” she said.

French leaders are concerned about the effect recent events may have on European Union integration, which has brought Paris considerable benefits over the decades. It has helped France maintain a leading voice on diplomatic and defence issues and given it the euro currency which, although now weaker, has still been stronger than the French franc would have been if Paris had stayed out of the eurozone.

The French have previously been supportive of Schengen, the area of 26 European countries that have abolished passport control. But they quickly reinstituted border controls after Friday’s killings. 

Ziad Majed, professor of political science at the American University in Paris, says he is worried about how Friday’s killings will change the political climate in France.

“So far, most French politicians try to avoid  appearing to want to benefit from what happened here,” Majed says. “However,” he continues, “I think we can expect to hear calls to review many policies – on refugees, on integration, on French foreign policy, for example.”

Indeed, President Hollande and his Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve have already announced a string of measures that have long been proposed by the opposition Right and far Right – the start of administrative procedures aimed at the expulsion of 34 “preachers of hatred”, the closure of their mosques, stripping dual nationals of their French ­citizenship if they are convicted of a terrorist offence, and the acceleration of the deportation of foreigners who pose “a particularly grave threat to the security of the nation”.

There is a considerable groundswell of ­opinion in France for more scrutiny of refugees/migrants who are let into the country, none of which will necessarily displease France’s Muslims. President Hollande has flexed his leadership muscles with a series of fast moves: raids to find further suspects, a military alliance with President Putin – the closest between Russia and the West for more than a decade – and the invoking of an EU mutual defence pact summoning member states to help in the face of armed aggression.

In the centre of Paris’ enormous Place de la République, around the massive statue of Marianne, the figurehead of the French Republic, hundreds of candles have been burning in memory of the Parisians killed for no other reason than that they were in the French capital that night in a hip part of town. They were French – but they were British, American, Portuguese, Mexican, Swedish, German too.

Thousands have flocked each day to this makeshift monument aux morts, including Muslims. Nabila, for example, a Tunisian-born French national, told me the Friday attacks have changed her mind about French military intervention against IS in Syria. “I wasn’t sure about it before,” she says. “I was worried about the consequences for France. But now I have no doubt. We have to eliminate them.” She is similarly gung-ho about hunting down IS sympathisers in France. “We have to hit them really hard,” she says. Even if that means compromising on the human rights the French Republic played a big role in codifying.

For some French Muslims, such as the imams who came to sing the French national anthem the Marseillaise at the scene of the Bataclan massacre, now is the time for their patriotism to come to the fore.

Seventeen years ago, the combination of race, religion and nationality in a nation at ease with itself seemed possible when a ­triumphant France won the World Cup. Les Bleus, as the national team is known, was made up of noir, blanc, beur – black, white and Arab, led by Zinedine Zidane, a man of Algerian Muslim extraction. But now France is no longer at ease, and the very stadium where the cup was won – the Stade de France – one of the targets of the murderous men of Friday night.

Tom Heneghan writes from France for The Tablet. John Laurenson is a freelance journalist based in Paris.