Last year, the French sociologist Emmanuel Todd caused controversy with his book Qui est Charlie? Todd argued that France had succumbed to collective hysteria after the murder in January 2015, by homegrown jihadi terrorists, of members of the editorial team of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo and customers at a kosher supermarket in Paris.
The enormous government-sanctioned popular mobilisation that followed the attacks was little more than an orgy of national self-congratulation, he said. And there was a darker side to the “virtuous ignorance” of those who marched in towns and cities across the country declaring that they too were “Charlie”. “The obsession with Islam was everywhere”, Todd observed, and French Muslims found themselves subjected to impromptu citizenship tests that required them to accept that ridicule of religion was not just a right but a duty. And in calling for mass demonstrations in the wake of the attacks, President François Hollande ran the risk of glorifying the perpetrators and giving “ideological meaning” to acts better understood as products of individual pathology.
Jean Birnbaum, a journalist for Le Monde, offers a very different account of the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in his new book, which, like Todd’s, was written before the slaughter in Paris on November 13. Indeed, you could say that Todd’s analysis is in fact an example of what Birnbaum calls “religious silence” — the failure of French politicians and intellectuals, especially on the left, to acknowledge or understand the religious dimension of Islamist terrorism.