Who is Charlie?: Xenophobia and the New Middle Class

Emmanuel Todd

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781509505784, 9781509505777
• eBook ISBN: 9781509505814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the wake of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015, millions took to the streets to demonstrate their revulsion, expressing a desire to reaffirm the ideals of the French Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité. But who were the millions of demonstrators who were suddenly united under the single cry of 'Je suis Charlie'?

In this probing new book, Emmanuel Todd investigates the cartography and sociology of the three to four million who marched in Paris and across France and draws some unsettling conclusions. For while they claimed to support liberal, republican values, the real middle classes who marched on that day of indignant protest also had a quite different programme in mind, one that was far removed from their proclaimed ideal. Their deep values were in fact more reminiscent of the most depressing aspects of France's national history: conservatism, selfishness, domination and inequality.

By identifying the anthropological, religious, economic and political forces that brought France to the edge of the abyss, Todd reveals the real dangers posed to all western societies when the interests of privileged middle classes work against marginalised and immigrant groups. Should we really continue to mistreat young people, force the children of immigrants to live on the outskirts of our cities, consign the poorer classes to the remoter parts of the country, demonise Islam, and allow the growth of an ever more menacing anti-Semitism? While asking uncomfortable questions and offering no easy solutions, Todd points to the difficult and uncertain path that might lead to an accommodation with Islam rather than a deepening and divisive confrontation.

1
A Religious Crisis

In their size and the metaphysical claims they were making, the 11 January demonstrations were a clear indication that France was going through a religious crisis. To judge from the disquiet of the demonstrators, the commentators and the government, you would have thought that 15–25 per cent of Muslims were preparing to force their faith onto the country of Joan of Arc, Voltaire and Charles de Gaulle.

Indeed, this was the theme of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, Soumission (Submission): it was destined to be a bestseller even before its publication, and before the horrors perpetrated by the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly. Éric Zemmour’s latest Islamophobic rant had also picked up a huge audience just before the attack happened. His Le Suicide français (French Suicide) sang the same old tune about the way that integration had failed, multiculturalism was a dead end, and our wonderful culture was at death’s door. On 30 October 2014, long before the events of 9 January, Zemmour told the Corriere della Sera (Italian daily newspaper) that France ought to start thinking about sending Muslims home. This eventually triggered a fascinating polemic concerning the semantic condensation in the word ‘deportation’ used by the Italian interviewer to describe what Zemmour had said. Was this term appropriate or not to describe the expulsion, on board ship, of a sector of the French population?

Islamophobia has its own rhythm. Insofar as it symbolically casts Muslims out of the national community, it is both a cause and an effect of terrorism. It is one of the two poles of an infernal dialectic in which the objective crisis afflicting the French suburbs, and the hysteria of ideology, feed into each other.

However, here as elsewhere, we need to situate the phenomenon sociologically and statistically. Support for Islamophobia, of a Houellebecquo-Zemmourian kind, is essentially confined to those who have the means to buy books and the time to read them – in other words, people of a certain age who belong to the middle classes. Neither the working-class milieus who vote for the National Front, nor young college graduates whose income is falling, have the means or the time to read Zemmour’s actual words, or Houellebecq’s.

Rather than charging at the red (or rather green) rag of Islam, we should dwell on the spiritual consternation afflicting the 94 per cent of the population that comes from a Christian background. We will be coming back later to the psychological and social state of the 4.5–5 per cent of Muslims who contribute to the existence of the French nation.

We need to treat these disproportionate figures – 94 per cent of Christian origin, 4.5–5 per cent of Muslim origin – with some caution. For each religious affiliation, this assessment includes, along with believers and practising members of their faith, those for whom religion is a memory rather than a present reality. The truth about religion in France in 2015 is that there is a lack of belief on a scale unprecedented in history. Among the totally secularized French we find the majority of children born into mixed marriages, i.e. to married couples from different religious backgrounds: these mixed marriages have sometimes been taking place over several generations. Their ancestry is a fraternal mixture of Christian, Muslim and Jewish elements, not forgetting the Buddhism, Confucianism and Hinduism of our compatriots of Asian origin.

We need to seek our country’s religious dynamics in the central mass of French society, of course, and not on its fringes. This methodological decision will help us to remember that, not so long ago, there were crowds out in the streets marching against ‘Marriage for all’. On 13 January 2013, two years before Charlie made its dramatic entrance onto the national stage, the most successful of the ‘Demos for all’ had brought together between 340,000 and 800,000 people in Paris, depending on whether we go with the figures provided by the police or the demonstrators themselves. A significant, often Catholic minority refused to allow that homosexual couples could legally marry. This led to a certain feverishness of a religious or quasi-religious kind in the central mass of French society, in a negative mode, as it were, as the reality of what was actually happening – marriage for all – marked yet one more stage in the nation’s continuing break with the traditional Christian vision of the family.

How did this religious crisis reveal itself on 11 January?

The terminal crisis in Catholicism

In France, religion and habits develop in concert. Religious practice finally collapsed, to all intents and purposes, between 1960 and 1990. In 1950, the average woman had three children: this fertility rate has since fallen to two, a change that includes the disappearance of big Catholic families. In 1960, 5.5 per cent of children were born out of wedlock: these days, it is 55 per cent. France, where the Church still played a massive part a few decades ago, is now, in its beliefs and its habits, a country of sceptics.

Thirty or forty years do not amount to much in the history of mentalities. Even today, the population pyramid still bears the imprint of an elderly population with some attachment to religion, looking down on the younger generations who are completely detached from religion. A recent IFOP survey gave a figure of 12.7 per cent of those polled who defined themselves as ‘practising’ Catholics. If strict criteria of religious sociology, i.e. counting the number of people who actually attend mass on Sundays, were applied, this proportion would probably be halved. The fact remains that, if the figures obtained from the self-definition of those polled are just 6.6 per cent for those aged 25–34, it is still 21.6 per cent for the 65–74 age group and 32.7 per cent for those aged 75 and more.¹ People who are now between 75 and 85 were between 20 and 30 in 1960. Since then, for this age group, religious practice has thus shrunk to a fifth.² That one-in-three of the ‘over-75s’ declare themselves to be practising does not show that France was, around 1960, uniformly Catholic, but already two-thirds de-Christianized.

And yet a fall in the numbers of practising Catholics from 33 per cent to 6 per cent is far from negligible, especially if it is accompanied by metaphysical disruption among the two-thirds of the population that, in 1960, had long since escaped the grip of Catholicism. France has slipped into a generalized lack of belief and a relaxation of morals, and this leads to problems of psychological and political balance for a population that is constantly changing.

Religious decline and the rise of xenophobia

A comparative study of times of dramatic religious decline in history forces us to raise the question of the psychological problems that such a transition may cause. A transformation or decline in belief is most often followed by some revolutionary event. The disappearance of its metaphysical framework almost automatically leads, in a population, to the emergence of a replacement ideology, whose values may vary but which is most often physically violent.

In France, around 1730–40, the number of priests being recruited in the Paris Basin and on the Mediterranean seafront had dried up, but was being maintained at a normal level in the rest of the kingdom. The French Revolution would follow on from this crisis in Catholicism, half a century later. The Church had guaranteed equality and fraternity to its faithful in their quest for eternal life, thanks to baptism for all and salvation through good works. In 1789, this distant goal was converted into the demand for an immediate liberty and equality in the Earthly City.

Note that Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, in which he expressed a completely anti-religious set of ideas, combative and droll, was published in 1764, i.e. twenty years after the collapse of the Church in two-thirds of the kingdom.

In Germany, between 1880 and 1930, the decline in religious practice in the two-thirds of the country that was Protestant led to the rise, first, of social democracy and anti-Semitism, and, second, of Nazism. Both Nietzsche’s rapturous utterances on the death of God and Weber’s religious sociology were also products of this metaphysical crisis. The ideological values that gained a voice in Nazi Germany were the opposite, term by term, of the values of revolutionary France, just as Protestantism had been the metaphysical opposite of the Catholicism of the Paris Basin around 1700. Lutheran predestination stated that human beings had an unequal chance of being saved: they were chosen or rejected even before they were born, by a decree of the Almighty that brooked no appeal. This authoritarian, inegalitarian theology was replaced, in 1933, by the demand for an immediate servitude on earth. Each race chose which people it would accept: the status of human beings was reserved for Aryans, while the Jews were condemned to the hell of the death camps – a secular transposition of the eternal damnation put forward by Luther.

We need to take religion seriously, especially when it starts to disappear. This is not the same as ignoring economic structures and crises: the French Revolution really was triggered by a rise in the cost of wheat, and the Nazi revolution by a wide-scale economic depression. But we also need to admit that neither famine nor unemployment by themselves would have produced such massive and intense (and victorious) revolutionary phenomena. The violence that attended their beginnings means that the French Revolution and Nazism attained in their own time – and still preserve in our memories – what might be called a ‘metaphysical status’. These events both emerged from a religious crisis, and were themselves in one sense religious.

Earthly ideologies differ in content because deep family values, latent anthropological systems, continue to guide the choices made by societies when they escape from the grip of religion in the strict sense of the term. In the heart of the Paris Basin, a liberal and egalitarian family structure regulated social behaviour; in Germany, an authoritarian and inegalitarian family structure gave it a completely different hue.

We are experiencing economic problems that are less brutal but longer lasting than the Great Crash of 1929. However, the political future of our society depends on a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Religious Crisis
• 2 Charlie
• 3 When Equality Fails
• 4 The French of the Far Right
• 5 The French Muslims
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement