Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

France vs Islamism: how does Macron hope to prosecute his war?

How does Macron hope to prosecute his war?

Montpellier

France is under attack. Two weeks ago, Samuel Paty, a middle school teacher, was decapitated in a leafy suburb of Paris after showing his students cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Last week, there were three killings at the Basilica of Notre-Dame in Nice, and after that, an Orthodox priest in Lyon was shot and gravely wounded. ‘Tell my children I love them,’ were the dying words of Simone Barreto Silva, a 44-year-old mother of three and herself an immigrant, killed in Nice.

France has gone to ‘war’ with Islamic ‘separatists’, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has claimed. The police have been rounding up the usual suspects, but with 20,000 individuals on the watch lists of the intelligence services, and hundreds of radical mosques breeding more, these are gestures.

Yet if this is a war, the Republic is hardly winning. Darmanin admits there will be further attacks, and is thin on the details of how they will be countered. Michel Houellebecq, in his 2015 novel Submission, predicted that the French establishment is ultimately more likely to collaborate with Islamists than seriously confront them. A French friend reminds me: ‘We’re not very good at winning wars.’

Last month, before the latest spate of violence began, President Emmanuel Macron delivered an exceptionally robust speech against Islamists, provoking furious protests from Muslims and western liberals. After the attacks, he further infuriated many Muslims by specifically reiterating his defence of the freedom to blaspheme.

Macron’s discourse is as politically expedient as it is a reflection of conviction, a swerve to the right as the 2022 presidential campaign approaches. Either way, his words have been exceptionally tough. Using language impossible to imagine being used in today’s Britain, he identified the core problem as ‘Islamic separatism… a politico-religious project… to create an alternative society… whose final goal is to take control’.

With the Revolution, France replaced worship of God with its own holy trinity: liberté, egalité and fraternité

Islam, he declared, is a religion ‘in crisis…plagued by radicalism and by a yearning for a reinvented jihad, the destruction of the “other”’.

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