Chronic Aftershock: How 9/11 Shaped Present-Day France 9780228009924

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Acknowledgments

CHRONIC AFT ER SHOCK

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Chronic Aftershock How 9/11 Shaped Present-Day France

J E A N - PH ILIPPE M AT H Y

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0865-1 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0992-4 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0993-1 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Chronic aftershock : how 9/11 shaped present-day France / JeanPhilippe Mathy. Names: Mathy, Jean-Philippe, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210239190 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210239352 | isbn 9780228008651 (cloth) | isbn 9780228009924 (epdf) | isbn 9780228009931 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Social aspects—France. | lcsh: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Influence. | lcsh: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Public opinion. | lcsh: War on Terrorism, 2001– 2009. | lcsh: Terrorism—France. | lcsh: Public opinion—France. | lcsh: United States—Foreign public opinion, French. Classification: lcc hv6433.f7 m38 2021 | ddc 363.3250944—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

Acknowledgments

To my wife Eileen

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 Debating le 11 septembre 22 2 Seeing Is Disbelieving: The Contested Visibility of 9/11

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3 Resisting the Iraq War: Freedom Fries, Bonaparte, and the Two Europes 100 4 The Anti-Anti-Americans 132 5 French Evangelicals and the Bush Legacy 171 6 A French 9/11? Paris 2015: Identification, Hegemony, and Dissent

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Conclusion: Why? Collective Trauma and Its Symbolization 238 Notes 251 References 263 Index 271

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Acknowledgments

Portions of this book appeared in the journal French Politics, Culture & Society, and in a collected volume on 9/11 in European Literature edited by Svenja Frank. I thank the publishers for their permission to reprint. I am grateful to the colleagues who kindly invited me to share my views in classroom settings or lecture formats on some of the issues discussed in this book, from French laïcité to American Francophobia and from France’s resistance to the Iraq war to the 2015 Paris attacks. Special thanks to Lucile Duperron, Brett Kaplan, Edward Knox, Anne Quinney, and Nadège Veldwachter. I also thank Jacqueline Mason and her colleagues at mqup for their invaluable help throughout the publishing process.

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C HRONIC AFT ER SHOCK

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Stephen Harold Riggins and Neil McLaughlin

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Introduction

Les idées n’engendrent pas plus la réalité historique qu’elles ne sont sécrétées par elle, elles sont dans l’histoire. Marcel Gauchet1

9/11 was from the start an American and a global event, in large part because its occurrence immediately coincided with its representation, as images of the impact of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center were broadcast worldwide mere minutes after it happened. Twenty years after the fact, we are still living in the spectral aftermath of a catastrophe forever known by its brief, telegrammed dating – two numbers – no weekday (it was a Tuesday) and no calendar year, a day without end whose memorialization still needs no annual reference (i.e., 2001) because what happened has, in some way, stepped out of time. The targeting of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon inevitably invited comparisons with the 1941 Japanese bombings in Pearl Harbor, remembered not as a date but as a place, and with other watershed moments in twentieth-century history, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, mass killings in Madrid, London, Mumbai, and Paris. In the cases of Pearl Harbor and Ground Zero, the long-lasting traumatic effect on American hearts and minds had to do with the loss of all the benefits of the country’s insularity, protected as it was by the vast expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, at least since the war of 1812. 9/11 exacerbated this feeling of an unredeemable loss of security because it took place on the mainland itself. The American imagination had

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from the start celebrated the geographic situation of a people preserved from the evil perpetrated on the rest of the planet, a result of the blessings bestowed by divine Providence on the New Jerusalem, the City upon the Hill. An island-continent, the new nation was not only a beacon but a sanctuary. Slaves, immigrants, and visitors, but no invaders, had come by sea, while the Apocalypse had rained down from the skies. During the American Revolution, poets and politicians alike made ample metaphorical use of the vast body of water separating them from the colonial power. Philip Freneau, for example, emphatically expressed the protective nature of the Atlantic in his “A Poem, on the Rising Glory of America,” written in 1771: By persecution wronged, And sacerdotal rage, our fathers came From Europe’s hostile shores to these abodes, Here to enjoy a liberty and faith, Secure from tyranny and base control, For this they left their country and their friends And dared the Atlantic wave in quest of peace. (Freneau 1902, 61) Thomas Jefferson echoed Freneau’s sentiment thirty-three years later when he referred in his inaugural address of 1804 to the horrors of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Americans needed to congratulate themselves for being “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe” (Jefferson 1950, 333). The ocean turned out to be a conduit as much as a buffer, America sending cotton and tobacco, democratic ideals, skyscrapers, and the sixties counterculture to the Old World and receiving in return manufactured products, Impressionist paintings, and millions of newcomers, whose languages, music, literature, religious creeds, political convictions, and yearnings for freedom, equality, and civil rights would write some of the most glorious and tragic chapters in the history of the republic. While 9/11 happened in the continental United States, became a local and national tragedy, and was linked to American foreign policy in the Middle East, it had an immediate worldwide impact, ushering in a new era of representations, actions, reactions, and ideological realignments that were not all entirely unprecedented as they reopened familiar pathways and crosscurrents. The official version

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provided by the government and the media was soon followed by rival, sometimes counter, narratives produced by supporters and opponents of American power and by self-appointed commentators both inside and outside the country, including countless bloggers on the Internet. The shocking, unpredicted nature of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, the fact that their images were broadcast almost immediately all around the world, the geostrategic stakes of the event, and its lasting, momentous consequences explain why considerations of the meaning, authenticity, and credibility of 9/11 have loomed large in ideological debates ever since. France has always held a special place in the American imagination, for better or for worse, from Lafayette’s involvement in the American Revolution and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the cultural, artistic, and architectural allure of Paris, not to mention the chronic anti-Americanism of the country’s intellectuals. The collapse of the World Trade Center was bound to revive many aspects of this transatlantic affair described by some as an endless love-hate relationship. This book examines the legacy of 9/11 in several areas of French culture and society, including politics, religion, literature, and philosophy, from the immediate reactions to the attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the 2015 mass killings in Paris (sometimes called “the French 9/11”) and their consequences down to the present. In order to account for the complexity and scope of the cultural politics of September 11 as a worldhistorical moment, I have borrowed from several disciplinary approaches, including intellectual history, literary criticism, cultural studies, political science, the sociology of knowledge, and critical theory. Le onze septembre, as the French call it, was inserted from the start in a web of rival readings, and this book is meant to address the diversity of these responses from various domains of discourse and practice, since my intent has been to map out as much of the field of ideological positions as possible. MAPPING OUT THE EVENT

The immediate response to 9/11 in France was voluminous, diverse, and wide-ranging, and it took the form of a robust conflict of interpretations among sociologists, anthropologists, (geo)political scientists, philosophers, novelists, journalists, and conspiracy theorists. The event was described in a psychological and ethical register as an

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instance of metaphysical evil, nihilism, sacrificial violence, sociopathy, auto-immunitarian process, and the loss of “primordial narcissism” in contemporary culture.2 Its political, social, and economic causes discussed by social scientists included racism, Islamophobia, job discrimination, residential segregation, poverty, oil interests, feudalism, technoscience, Wahhabism, Salafism, American hegemony, mondialisation, Zionism, Middle Eastern geopolitics, the failed modernization of Arab states, and the ressentiment of their dispossessed people. Analytical interventions covered the entire spectrum of intellectual politics, from the anti-imperialism of the left (J. Derrida, A. Badiou) to centrist liberals (J.-M. Colombani), to the pro-American neoconservatives à la française (B.-H. Lévy, A. Glucksmann, A. Adler), to the spirited defence of the West and its Christian heritage (inspired by Samuel P. Huntington’s 1996 best-selling The Clash of Civilizations) on the far right. Several intertextual themes emerge from the accounts written in 2002 and 2003, including the appeal to a common European position on the war against terrorism; the contrast between socio-political interpretations of the event and metaphysical and moral readings based on the evil nature of nihilistic terror; the debated issue of whether the attacks were unprecedented and beyond compare; and what I have called their contested visibility resulting from the growing manipulation of physical reality by technologies of visual representation.3 Proliferating theories, whether of the “critical” or the “conspiracy” kind, have attempted to provide a symbolic articulation of what remained for many both an “unexplainable” and an “unbelievable” set of circumstances, a disaster of tremendous proportions devoid of any meaning or plausibility. The fact that it had global consequences while only a handful of people actually witnessed it placed 9/11 at the centre of the vexed interaction of image-making and truth-telling in today’s culture informed by the logic of virtual reality. Conspiracist writings in particular were based on these dialectics of visibility, intelligibility, and credibility, and for large segments of public opinion seeing was disbelieving. In the views of many, the undisclosed nature of the human cost of the war on terror in the mainstream media (“we aren’t allowed to see what we are supposed to believe”) contributed to the growing skepticism regarding the truth about what happened (“we should not believe the filtered and incomplete information we are allowed to

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see”). One of the first books questioning the truth of the official version was published in France to considerable success.4 My intent has been to map out as much as possible of the field of the major paradigms making up the public discourse on 9/11 and after in France, without privileging any in order to convey the scope, diversity, and at times contentiousness of the various responses to the event. The conflict of interpretations was structured along ideological, theoretical, and disciplinary fault lines, between social scientists and philosophers, for example, as well as within their respective areas of expertise: Adler vs Roy, for example, among specialists of geopolitics, or in the discipline of philosophy between critical theorists, who read the event in political terms, and humanists (such as André Glucksmann or Jean-Pierre Dupuy), who focused on ethics, denouncing the attacks as a symptom of moral decay. Meanwhile, former adversaries in 1970s and 1980s controversies about postmodernism, deconstruction, and foundationalism (such as Habermas, Derrida, or Badiou) made common cause against the ideological and semiotic implications of “the war on terrorism.” In many ways, 9/11 revived some of the major lines of division within French society after the end of les trente glorieuses, the thirty-year period of postwar economic prosperity, liberalization, and modernization brought down to a close by the “oil crisis” of 1973. The following decades witnessed a series of significant changes, including a steady increase in unemployment, the spectacular electoral rise of le Front national, the successive “affairs” of the Islamic veil, growing tensions in immigrant neighbourhoods, strong anti-European Union sentiment, etc. The collapse of the Twin Towers provided a new context to a number of these issues, including Islamist radicalism, North–South conflicts and inequalities, globalization under US leadership, and threats to French national sovereignty. The 9/11 “culture wars” were not limited to the immediate aftermath of the event but continued in the following decades, through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq all the way to the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice in 2015–16. The new world (dis)order born of the spread of Islamic jihad in the Muslim world and in western Europe and the electoral gains of national-populism in eastern Europe, India, Brazil, and the United States led to the decline of traditional parties, the rise of new movements headed by charismatic leaders, and a new political configuration that replaced the classic postwar confrontation between communists, social democrats, and moderate conservatives

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with a struggle involving national-populists, ethnocentric nativists, neoliberal globalists, and multiculturalist radicals. In the French context, the new ideological configuration has opposed identitaires, souverainistes, and Catholic traditionalists on the right, secularist and universalist néo-républicains in the centre, and communautaristes, indigénistes antiracistes, and décoloniaux, increasingly allied with the radical fractions of the Green movement (Les Verts), on the left. THE EMPIRE TALKS BACK

Within the novel geopolitical space of the North Atlantic, the effect of September 11 was not only felt in a single direction, from the New World to the Old, but soon travelled back to the United States as European governments, media, and ordinary citizens reacted to what had happened, initially expressing widespread solidarity with the American people. An editorial in Le Monde famously proclaimed that “in this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: we are all Americans! ... We are all New Yorkers, just as certainly as John Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in Berlin in 1962.”5 The honeymoon, however, proved to be short-lived. On the day Colombani’s piece appeared in Le Monde, the Security Council of the United Nations (France is a permanent member) unanimously adopted resolution 1368 recognizing the United States’ right to selfdefence, thereby accrediting the Bush administration’s framing of the strikes as “acts of war,” and the US Senate unanimously authorized the president to use military force. The conflation of the rhetoric of selfdefence and international endorsements paved the way to Operation Enduring Freedom, a series of air strikes and combat operations against the Taliban regime, accused of having provided a safe haven to Osama bin Laden, identified by the United States as the mastermind behind the coordinated attacks. Voices on both sides of the Atlantic urged the American government to exercise restraint, and as early as a week after 9/11, 76 per cent of Europeans expressed their preference for a judicial rather than a military response to the tragedy (Truc 2018, 32). In such a charged ideological context, the use of terms such as “attacks” and “terrorists” were bound to become highly sensitive, given the diverse connotations attached to them by governments, media commentators, and partisans on all sides of the debate. The English word “attack” used in many of the statements and documents

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quoted throughout this book is stronger than its most common French equivalent attentat and served to bolster definitions of 9/11 as a declaration of war rather than a criminal activity. Any insurgent is bound to become someone’s terrorist, as evidenced by instances in the French and Middle-Eastern contexts: the Nazis accused of terrorism the paramilitary groups intent on liberating France from foreign occupation during World War II, while the French military used the same label a decade later against nationalists in colonized Algeria. In the 1940s, the governments of Britain and the United States condemned as terrorist activities the bombing and assassination campaigns by Irgun Zionist militants determined to establish by force an independent Jewish state in Mandated Palestine under British rule, while US and Israeli authorities view the “Islamic Resistance Movement” Hamas in the Gaza Strip as a terrorist organization. The word “terror” (as in “the war on terror”) usually does not carry the same explicit partisan connotations, since it often refers to the traumatic effect of mass violence on its victims and on public opinion in general, even though the Terror of 1793–94 during the French Revolution refers to politically motivated massive arrests, detentions, and executions by the government and has often been viewed as the foundational moment of state terrorism in modern times. While the dominant narrative in the United States was couched in patriotic and/or nationalistic terms and framed September 11 as a singular, unrepeatable event aimed at the leader of the free world, many European media evoked the beginning of a Third World War against “the West,” a broader, global apocalypse involving the survival of the entire human race and in this respect closer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (where the US military had caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties) than to Pearl Harbor (conventional air strikes aimed at navy facilities and military personnel). The fire raining down out of a perfectly blue late summer sky: the thick pall of dust, the acrid smell of burned human flesh, the dismembered bodies, the lunar landscape of eviscerated buildings conjured up images of nuclear deflagration and martyred cities, prompting Paris-Match to evoke the recent genocidal wars in Yugoslavia (1991–99), equating Ground Zero with “Sarajevo on Wall Street.” The reactions to the Madrid train bombings less than three years later would again underscore stark transatlantic differences in dealing with terrorism in terms of ideological rhetoric and representational strategies. Instead of supporting a retaliatory stance from their government, as most Americans had done, millions

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of Spaniards took to the streets to demand the end of their country’s armed involvement in Iraq. European journalists had already been quite critical of the self-censorship of their American colleagues, who were prone to tone down any criticism of the official version of 9/11 and reluctant to show any images of violence, dead soldiers, first responders, or civilians from New York City to Kabul. In contrast, graphic photographs of the Madrid victims made the headlines of newspapers across Europe. Sixty years ago, Melvin Lasky wondered whether the wheel of European–American relations could “ever break out of the traditional circle it has been making for centuries. In Europe: a utopian proAmericanism in times of adventurous hope, and then the turn to a grumbling anti-Americanism in times of stress. In America: a naive and nostalgic pro-Europeanism when life was raw and difficult, and then the turn to a strident anti-Europeanism when prosperity made for power and national confidence” (Lasky 1963, 466). By the time the United States was ready to “liberate” Iraq in the spring of 2003, Lasky’s wheel had come back full circle again to the Europeans’ cyclical concern with the century-old American display of military might and hegemonic intent, from the Spanish-American conflict of 1898 and the Vietnam War to the sabre-rattling against Saddam Hussein. In the eyes of its critics, the White House had failed to make the case that regime change in Baghdad was directly linked to September 11, and the imminent invasion was not supported by the United Nations. Opening up another military front would simply increase the chances of widespread conflict in the Middle East and its attendant mass murders in European cities. FRANCE , THE UNRELIABLE ALLY

In the case of France, the return-to-sender took the form of the active engagement of President Jacques Chirac and many of his compatriots against the war in Iraq. Those were the days when French wine was poured down the streets of New York City and French fries renamed “freedom fries” in the restaurant of Congress. Chirac was a selfdescribed Gaullist, and his position fit squarely with many of the general’s independent, and often critical, views of America’s projection of its power worldwide, which had led to France’s departure from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966 and to subsequent closure of all US military bases in the country. The Chirac administration’s strategy

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was to secure broad support in the United Nations against George W. Bush’s own “coalition of the willing” made up of countries ready for military intervention. The French resistance culminated in Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s famous speeches before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in which he urged the United States to show restraint and promote diplomatic rather than military action. Villepin argued that the use of force was not justified at that point, that disarming Iraq after a thorough inspection of Saddam’s military arsenal was a credible alternative to war, that a premature military intervention would end the unity of the international community in its denunciation of the Baghdad regime and would have “incalculable consequences for the stability of [the Middle East,] this scarred and fragile region [and] would compound the sense of injustice, increase tensions and risk paving the way to other conflicts,” all predictions that would soon come true. Predictably, the French diplomat called attention to the recent memory of 9/11: “Since the tragedy of September 11, [the fight against terrorism] has been one of the highest priorities facing our peoples. And France, which was struck hard by this terrible scourge several times, is wholly mobilized in this fight which concerns us all and which we must pursue together” (2003). Villepin, a diplomat, poet, and essayist, was by no means a die-hard anti-American: he was quite familiar with life in the United States, having spent his teenage years in the country and attending the Lycée français in New York City. The French intervention at the UN was instrumental in blocking the second resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, with the support of Germany, Russia, and China, among others. Condoleeza Rice, then national security advisor in the Bush administration, allegedly summed up the American response in the following words: “Forgive Russia, ignore Germany, and punish France” (Gordon 2007). Lasky’s cyclical transatlantic rift, opened up in the spring of 2003, found a vivid illustration in the ways American foreign policy analysts such as Robert Kagan and European political philosophers such as Étienne Balibar and Peter Sloterdjik thematized the new differences within the West. In his influential Of Power and Paradise: America and Europe in the New World Order (2004), Kagan, a noted neoconservative, framed the new transatlantic drift in decidedly gendered terms, arguing that Europeans were from Venus, living in a post-Kantian paradise of perpetual peace, while Americans were from Mars, their country

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eternally mired in history and thereby condemned to project its power across the globe. Balibar, a critic of Kagan, drew the contours of what could be a new non-idealized, non-essentialized “European citizenship,” urging his fellow intellectuals throughout the old continent to defend the rights to self-determination that the United States, as the new Hobbesian Behemoth (rather than Leviathan) and selfappointed universal judge of right and wrong, had denied sovereign but dominated peoples by arrogantly ignoring the United Nations’ resolution against the invasion of Iraq. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk undermined for his part the notion of a unified transatlantic civilization by drawing a sharp contrast between “the First West” (the United States) and “the Second West” (Europe) and hailing his country’s leader, Chancellor Gerhardt Schroëder, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East, as an incarnation of the “European type of Western identity.” A TRANSATLANTIC AFFAIR : AMERICAN NEO - JACOBINS , FRENCH NEOCONSERVATIVES

The Iraq War revived what I have called “the philosophical Atlantic” as the locus of a century-old dispute about the shared legacy of the Old World and the New, from Buffon and Abbé Raynal’s famous comments on the degeneracy of America’s inhabitants and physical environment (a thesis ardently refuted by Jefferson) to the Cold War debates among nationalists, Marxists, and Atlantistes (Sartre vs Aron, for example) by way of Tocqueville’s views on the role played by Cartesian precepts and “the philosophical method” of the European Enlightenment on the exceptional nature of the American experiment, even though the author of Democracy in America expressed serious reservations about the “tyranny of the majority,” slavery, and the future of race relations and, at the end of his life, the rise of violence, intolerance, and corruption in an increasingly imperial republic. One had to be careful, he warned his readers, not to confuse “what is democratic with what is only American.” 9/11, in addition to being a world-historical, global event, was also a local (“Ground Zero”) and national tragedy that triggered yet another discussion, both in the United States and abroad, of American cultural influence and military might across the world. As a result, Canadian, Peruvian, South Korean, or Nigerian commentators

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are likely to engage not only with their own perceptions of the United States but with the way Americans have generally related to their own respective cultures, given the position of the United States in the world. As a result, a study of the impact of the event in any country will inevitably involve a comparative, transcultural, dialogic element. The way the French have resisted American representations of their own culture and politics for decades cannot but have coloured their reaction to September 11. The dialogic nature of the debate on 9/11 in different national contexts explains why French history found its way into the American dispute about the Iraq war, when political scientist Claes. G. Ryn accused the neoconservative architects of regime change in Baghdad of being “Neo-Jacobins,” i.e., heirs to the most radical fraction of the French revolutionaries, a thesis whose irony was hard to escape, given the fact that the Bush administration had spent a good part of 2003 vilifying France for its hostility to the war (Ryn 2003a). Ryn, a classic conservative, naturally borrowed from the critique of the French Revolution found in Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre and applied it to the present moment, accusing the neoconservatives of having inherited from their Jacobin predecessors a moralistic view of politics, a good measure of intolerant self-righteousness, a penchant for metaphysics and abstract universalism, and a will to power masquerading as a mission to liberate the world from tyranny. I discussed Ryn’s notion of neo-Jacobinism in the broader context of the system of Francophobia that has regularly pitted US conservatives and liberals alike against French republicanism, especially during the decade leading up to 9/11. While the American right has been particularly averse to the statism, centralization, elitism, and intellectualism of Gallic culture and institutions, the multiculturalist left has for its part rejected the assimilationist and universalist bent inherent in dominant definitions of Frenchness, especially as regards the treatment of Blacks, Arabs, other minorities, and immigrants. Ryn’s thesis also provided an opportunity to set the historical record straight as regards Robespierre and the Club des Jacobins’ initial opposition to foreign war and the invasion of neighbouring countries advocated by their adversaries, the Girondists, as a threat to the survival of the revolutionary ideals both at home and abroad and to foreground the complexities of both the Jacobin legacy in France and the fate of the neoconservative ideology in America and on the other side of the Atlantic.

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THE ANTI - ANTI - AMERICANS

The critical assessment of American foreign policy in the Middle East and in South Asia in most of the French political spectrum after 9/11 was not unanimous. A small but vocal group of French public intellectuals, historians, and foreign policy experts supported the global war on terror during George W. Bush’s second term in office. The self-described “anti-anti-Americans” (rather than the plain and simple pro-Americans of old) comprised major figures of the Parisian intellectual scene such as the aforementioned Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner, and Alexandre Adler. Like the postwar first generation of American neoconservatives, whom they resembled in several ways, several of the anti-anti-Americans hailed from the 1960s radical left but turned against the Marxism of their student days during the following decade. A content analysis of one of their most influential, albeit understudied, journals, Le Meilleur des mondes (2001–08), serves to highlight the main components of their ideology. While supporting the invasion of Iraq in its earlier stage, the review never departed from the critical distance the French Atlanticists have always kept from some aspects of American culture and politics, including military arrogance and religious fervour. I have chronicled the evolution of their perception of the United States down to the present as their initial support of US foreign policy turned into resentful disappointment given the Bush administration’s inability to durably secure regime change in Baghdad and into an even more jaundiced view of the Trump presidency. Meanwhile, their neo-Gaullist, souverainiste opponents, who had resented both Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande’s alignment with Washington, have found some solace in Emmanuel Macron’s rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy in Syria after Macron became president in 2017. EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS AS MUSLIMS

In the spring of 2003, the transatlantic prism reflected a set of familiar images: in the old world, accusations of American arrogance, imperialism, and self-righteous ignorance of the rest of the world; in the new world, dismissive comments on the military weakness, strategic irrelevance, economic dependence, and diplomatic timid-

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ity of unreliable European allies. Beyond time-tested criticism on both sides, clichés such as “the new world order” or “the end of the Cold War” (reformulated in academic circles as “the end of history” thesis) had brought new developments to the fore after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the previous decade. Most conspicuous among these was the much-debated “return of religion” in France. All of a sudden, the politics of faith was everywhere: in the street, in classrooms, in immigrant neighbourhoods and in the National Assembly, in politicians’ stump speeches, on TV and in films, in the writings of opinion-makers, and, of course, in the midst of transatlantic quarrels. Americans had been arguing for a long time about prayer in school, and now the French, that most secular of people, were riling against the presence of Islamic veils in their public schools. The fashionable quotation in those days was André Malraux’s apocryphal prophecy: “The 21st century will be spiritual, or it will not be.” According to many sociologists, France (and Europe) had entered a post-Christian era, but the corpse of religiosity was still kicking. In 2004, the same year as the voting on the law banning Muslim headdresses in schools, a widespread media campaign from the left accused French evangelicals of supporting George W. Bush’s politics because, like their coreligionists in the US, they shared his theological views as well. Churches and associations strongly pushed back against growing allegations that they all approved of the proselytizing, global designs of the American Christian Right, arguing on the contrary that both their faith and their politics were hardly monolithic and could not be construed as unconditional support of the United States’ policy in the Muslim world. I have devoted a chapter to the controversy, framing it within a brief history of the role played by American missionaries and prominent preachers such as Billy Graham in the revival of born-again Protestantism in France after 1945, and contrasted the media campaign against French evangelicals to their actual, divided political views and voting behaviour. Increased proselytizing efforts by evangelical groups in North Africa to convert Muslims, and especially Berbers, to Christianity have added an interesting twist to what had been mainly a contest between the secular left and Protestant churches by bringing French Islam once again into the debate in a tangential way via its (post)colonial roots in, and continued connections with, the Maghreb.

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FROM CHARLIE HEBDO TO LE BATACLAN : A FRENCH 9/11?

In January and November 2015, repeated mass killings by Islamists in Paris immediately led to a comparison with 9/11 and became grist for a new turn of the interpretive mill as commentators argued over similarities and differences between two events separated by almost fifteen years in the light of similar instances in Bali, Casablanca, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, to cite some of the deadliest examples. The much-publicized notion of le onze septembre français (the French 9/11) was not entirely justified, given the absence in France of a broad national consensus comparable to the one that followed the 2001 attacks on American soil. Ironically, the tables were turned, it seemed: since the Chirac administration and a large section of the country’s public opinion had been opposed to the invasion of Iraq, the American liberal media urged President Hollande not to repeat the mistakes of the Bush White House and to show restraint in responding to radical political Islam with military strikes abroad and the curtailing of civil liberties at home with the establishment of increasingly drastic states of emergency reminiscent of the Patriot Act in the United States. The grammatical form of the hashtag I am Charlie was a statement of personal identification: the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, targeted for having repeatedly published caricatures of Muhammad, embodied freedom of speech and the right to blasphemy and became an allegorical figure representing all the victims, journalists, cartoonists, staffers, and police officers, as well as the shoppers and employees at the Kosher Market murdered a few hours later. Meanwhile, a counter-identification process emerged almost immediately in rejection of the first-person slogan Je suis Charlie as Muslims across the world in massive demonstrations proclaimed “I am Kouachi” in solidarity with the two brothers (later killed by the police) who had targeted the magazine. One of the most controversial rejections of the Charlie movement was unsurprisingly couched in identificatory terms as well. Emmanuel Todd, a reputed historian, demographer, and public intellectual, gave his scathing critique of the French liberal elites’ obsession with Islam and betrayal of their country’s republican tradition the significant title: Who Is Charlie? (Todd, 2015b).

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Less than a year after the January killings, the city of Paris was once again rocked by a series of coordinated jihadist strikes in a soccer stadium, numerous cafés and restaurants, and a popular concert venue, the Bataclan theatre. This time, the casualties were incomparably higher: 130 people were killed across the French capital, and another 413 people were wounded, a quarter of them seriously. While the January commando was associated with al-Qaeda in Yemen, the second set of operations had been directed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In January as well as in the following November, the mainstream political parties, from the socialists in power to the moderate right, attempted to articulate a unified, hegemonic response to the killings (while excluding the far right Front National) by identifying the fate of the individual victims to the wounded body politic but failed to achieve the patriotic consensus the French president called for in a series of speeches rhetorically reminiscent of some of his American counterpart’s statements fifteen years earlier. There lay one of the main differences between the original 9/11 and what many described as its French version. While in 2001 the overwhelming majority of the American people and their political representatives were united behind the government, the reactions to what happened in Paris revealed deep divisions in French society, from the initial universalized solidarity of Je suis Charlie to a significant wave of dissent among Muslims at home and abroad. The absence of a national(ist) consensus included accusations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia hurled from opposing sides, pleas for military restraint, contention about whether the slayings were to be handled as a criminal act or an act of war, and a strong opposition from the left to a state of emergency threatening free speech and civil liberties. The debate took an international post-colonial turn when some African media bemoaned the inherent ethnocentrism of the public discourse in the West, noting that the kind of massive expressions of grief and solidarity that followed the slayings in Charlie Hebdo’s offices never happens when the victims live in non-Western countries. The chapter also addresses a third major instance of mass killings in southern France (Nice) on Bastille Day, 2016, and the ongoing controversy about the radicalization of the French youth who joined the ranks of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria after it reached global prominence.

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RADICALIZATION OF ISLAM OR ISLAMIZATION OF RADICALISM ?

The jihadist strikes on French soil between January 2015 and July 2016 gave rise not only to strong anti-Muslim reactions from the far right but to yet another clash of interpretations occasioned by one of the most pressing question of the post-Charlie era: why did so many, mostly male, young people born in Muslim families or recent converts to Islam resort to jihadist violence at home and/or join the ranks of the Caliphate in Syria? The reason for the intense focus of public discourse on the issue was that the presence of homegrown Islamists meant that the source of the threat was not only external, linked to international contexts such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the spread of fundamentalism in the Arab world, but was produced by French society itself. As had been the case after 9/11, social scientists, historians, philosophers, and public intellectuals were once again mobilized by an increased demand for expertise on the political, religious, and sociological dynamics behind the rise of pro-Daesh warriors. Specialists of Islam and the Arab world found themselves highly sought after by the media and involved in a long-running, and at times rancorous, polemic over the relation between Islam, Salafism, and jihad within France. A small group of Islamologistes strongly disagreed as to whether the answer lay in the continuous rise of religious fundamentalism in minority and immigrant neighbourhoods or rather in the presence of systematic prejudice, segregation, and discrimination directed at Muslims, inevitably producing a new class of young rebels attracted to extremist holy war rhetoric in the absence of any other ideological alternative, such as the now-defunct revolutionary register of the sixties. The dispute took the form of a theoretical and methodological contrast between two seemingly incompatible theses: “the Islamization of radicalism” vs “the radicalization of Islam.” The first line of argument, represented by Olivier Roy, who had written on 9/11 more than a decade earlier, contended that the French-born jihadists were politically radicalized individuals who had found in the rhetoric of the Caliphate a grand narrative in which to inscribe their personal rebellion against social, economic, and educational inequalities. Roy’s critics, notably Gilles Kepel and Bernard Rougier, argued on the other hand that the root of the problem remained religious, fuelled by the growing influence of Salafist fundamentalist mosques, Koranic

Introduction

19

schools, and communitarian associations throughout what Kepel had called in a ground-breaking book published three decades earlier “les banlieues de l’Islam” (the suburbs of Islam). The quarrel fit squarely within the previous framework of broader political contests surrounding immigration, discrimination, and ethnic separatism. For example, Roy was associated in a press article with la gauche libérale à l’anglo-saxonne (the Anglo-American liberal left), regularly attacked for its “political correctness” by far-right identitaires (Boltanski, 2019), while Rougier argued that the Salafists’ “hegemonic project” of reverse occupation and colonization threatened the French Republic’s century-old national project of emancipating the citizenry from fanatical clericalism (Rougier 2020). Other scholars soon entered the fray, rejecting the oversimplification inherent in the rival theses or pointing out that they conveniently ignored the geopolitical roots of Islamism, thereby exonerating the West from any responsibility in the spread of global jihad. Many argued that an overemphasis on culture and religion ended up downplaying the various determinants of an extremely complex phenomenon and a very diverse set of beliefs, values, and judgments on violence within the Muslim population. TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

This book belongs to the kind of intellectual history François Dosse recently described as the necessary combination “of a purely internal approach that would only take into account the content of the works, and of an external approach that would settle for explaining the contents solely by their contexts. Intellectual history is only possible if it goes beyond this misleading alternative and considers both poles together” (Dosse 2018). In this view, texts and contexts closely interact, and their dialectics prevents the twin pitfall of a purely internal, formal reading of texts and of a narrowly deterministic sociology of their authors “subject to a logic of suspicion reducing the other to her social and spatial positioning, or to his psychological character” (ibid., 16). Dosse convened two of his colleagues in support of his contention, Jean-François Sirinelli, on the side of the required detailed attention to content (“there is indeed a categorical imperative for the history of cultural elites: it must not sidestep the study of works and movements”), and Marcel Gauchet, for the need to resist a purely deterministic account of the genesis of superstructures (“ideas do not

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beget historical reality any more than they are produced by it, they are in history,” my emphasis) (ibid.). As a result, this study addresses a specific set of responses to 9/11 and its aftermath, mostly written texts from what Régis Debray (1981) once called la haute intelligentsia, including influential journalists, high-level civil servants, think-tank members, prominent academics, well-connected writers, essayists, and publishers, self-styled philosophes, and public intellectuals. While the focus of the book has remained on intellectual politics as textual conflicts of ideas, fictions, and theories, the imperative to also take contexts into account has meant that broader social and cultural dimensions of contemporary France, including gender, religion, immigration, and political institutions, were brought to bear on the framing of the debates. There is obviously room for many other approaches to the legacy of 9/11 in France that could profitably focus on visual arts and filmic material, popular culture, and non-elite counter-publics. The “culture wars” I mentioned earlier have involved a new generation of cultural critics active in social media who are situated outside of well-established intellectual circles and mainstream political parties. Some of the conspiracy theorists discussed in chapter 2 are also representatives of the changing landscape of ideologies and their technological supports in contemporary societies. The first two chapters are devoted to the immediate response to 9/11 in 2001 and 2002. Chapter 1 focuses on the broader intellectual sphere in France, including academia and the media, while chapter 2 looks at novels (notably Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World and Fanny Taillandier’s Par les écrans du monde) and conspiracy theories, with a focus on the stylistic tropes and rhetorical strategies used in both types of narrative. The next three chapters are related to the war in Iraq and its consequences. Chapter 3 addresses the major role played by France in opposing the US-led invasion and the emergence of a renewed sense of European identity related to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s contrast between “Old Europe,” opposed to the Bush doctrine, and “NATO Europe,” supportive of US foreign policy. Chapter 4 looks at the small but vocal group of French public intellectuals, historians and foreign policy experts who supported the global war on terror during George W. Bush’s terms in office. Chapter 5 turns to the little-known, but in my view significant, episode in the post-9/11 religious wars that, for once, did not involve Islam, at least directly, but a growing minority of French evangelicals caught up

Introduction

21

in the legacy of the American president’s religious views and close links to the Christian Right in the United States. Chapter 6 connects the 2015 attacks in Paris with the previous legacy of 9/11 in France, using three analytical categories, identification, hegemony, and dissent, to assess the conflicting responses to the January and November massacres from political authorities, supporters of the victims, and defenders of Islam as a religious faith under attack from the secular institutions of la République. The book ends with some remarks on the symbolization of collective trauma in contemporary social formations and the unfortunate prospect of continued acts of terroristic violence in France after 2015, as evidenced by the murder on 16 October 2020 by a young Muslim refugee from Chechnya of a middle-school history teacher who had shown some of the caricatures of the Prophet previously published in Charlie Hebdo to his class as part of a discussion on religious freedom and the right to blasphemy.

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1 Debating le 11 septembre

It’s true that no perspective is privileged (which actually means that the more perspectives you include, the more adequate and more accurate your map becomes). Ken Wilber

The response to 9/11 throughout the year 2002 was of staggering proportions. In his review of “the September 11 of the French thinkers,” François Lagarde quoted no less than thirty-eight books and articles from philosophers, anthropologists, political scientists, critical theorists, psychoanalysts, journalists, politicians, survivors, witnesses, and conspirationists who produced an onslaught of contradictory readings in newspaper and review articles, essays, novels, interviews, memoirs, televised appearances, etc., once the initial period of what the French call sidération (post-traumatic shock) had passed. As mentioned in the introduction, the reasons, roots, and contexts of the event included metaphysical evil, nihilism, sacrificial violence, mimetic desire, hatred for the West, sociopathy, postmodernity, autoimmunitarian processes, the loss of “primordial narcissism” in contemporary social formations, racism, job discrimination, residential segregation, poverty, oil interests, feudalism, Islamophobia, technoscience, fundamentalism, Wahhabism, Salafism, American hegemony, mondialisation, Zionism, neo-colonialism, anti-imperialism, MiddleEastern geopolitics, the failed modernization of Arab states, and the oppression of their people. Lagarde titled his essay “Penser l’impensable” (Thinking the Unthinkable) to underline the paradox of a flood of written words to qualify an event otherwise said to elude all attempts at conceptualiza-

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tion. Many commentators initially claimed that le 11 septembre, as 9/11 was referred to in French, was so thoroughly bewildering as to reduce them to abdicate their very raison d’être as intellectuals, opinionmakers, and self-appointed professionals of interpretation. Jacques Derrida summed it up in one of the first published reactions to the event: “‘Something’ took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming ... but this very thing, the place and meaning of this ‘event’ remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept (out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and is so reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it’s talking about” (Borradori 2003, 86). Many of the early responses echoed Derrida’s statement, albeit in less philosophical language, and the reactions were often couched in similar privative terms, approaching the elusive nature of the event much like medieval negative theology once regarded the attributes of the unnameable divine. The unanticipated horror was not only ineffable but also unreadable, indescribable, unrepresentable, unwatchable, unreceivable, unconscionable, unimaginable, unpredictable, inconceivable, and incomparable, an “irreducible singularity” like no other. One commentator claimed six months after the fact that “the events still have not found a name”; another declared after a year that it was useless to hope for the eventual revelation of a hidden meaning in “this reversed Epiphany” that caused “the burial, the eclipse, the dislocation of all meaning and all narrative ... The fire that engulfed the [World Trade Center] WTC [will] not bring knowledge but ignorance” (Lagarde 2005, 93). And yet, those who are mandated to make sense of the world soon wished to perform their social function by providing their readers with a proper handle on what seemed senseless chaos. The initial phase, which Lagarde described as the “ground zero of meaning,” was not indefinitely tenable. “After the silent horror,” he wrote, “speech came back to explain, understand, justify or condemn” (ibid.), except for those few who resisted all attempts to absolve, and worse yet explain away, what they saw as inexcusable. André Glucksmann accused “the explainers of 9/11” of suffering from “delirious denial” (Glucksmann 2002, 94) in Dostoïevski à Manhattan, a 276-page book that inserted the most recent instance of the “universal atrocity of

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nihilistic terrorism” within a sweeping genealogy going back to the birth of the Greek polis. Pascal Bruckner argued for his part in a piece entitled “Tous coupables? Non” (All Guilty? No), published in Le Monde on 25 September, that “the frantic quest for causes, even if well-intentioned, [was] on the wrong track: the culture of excuses, the explanation by despair and humiliation absolve the act of its horror and lead to the temptation of leniency.” Both Glucksmann and Bruckner had burst onto the intellectual scene in the late 1970s as representatives of what the media dubbed la nouvelle philosophie, a virulent critique of the Marxist legacy in postwar French thought that became part and parcel of “the antitotalitarian moment” in the French life of ideas (Christofferson 2004). Given their ideological leanings, the no longer “new” philosophers naturally saw in 9/11 the latest instance of the spread of totalitarianism in the world and soon championed the cause of the war in Iraq as members of what New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik famously called “the anti-antiAmericans” (see chapter 4). Faithful to the agenda that had propelled them overnight to media celebrity status three decades earlier, their strategy was both political and metaphysical, political because it was metaphysical. There could be no holding back on the war on terror because islamofascisme was not the product of contingent economic or cultural causes but because it was inherently evil and therefore could not be addressed by any kind of social engineering, by changes in the theological or geopolitical contexts of its emergence (American neoconservatives more pragmatically disagreed, claiming, wrongly as it turned out, that “regime change” would address the problem, at least in Iraq and Afghanistan). On the opposite end of the spectrum, several major figures on the left persisted in advancing a host of socio-political reasons for the strikes on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. In Philosophy in A Time of Terror, Jürgen Habermas criticized the US administration for “continuing, more or less undisturbed, the self-centered course of a callous superpower” (Habermas 2003, 27), called “Bush’s decision to call for a ‘war against terrorism’ a serious mistake” (34), and compared “the misery of war-torn Afghanistan” to “images from the Thirty Years’ War” in the seventeenth century (27). Noam Chomsky declared for his part in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto on 19 September that “the horrifying atrocities of September 11 are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target” (Chomsky 2011, 43). It was unprecedented in two significant

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ways: not only had the United States’ national territory not been under attack, or even threatened, since the war of 1812 against Britain, but for the first time since the advent of colonialism, the dominated had struck at the heart of the dominant nation. “For the first time,” Chomsky noted, “the guns have been directed the other way. That is a dramatic change” (44). Was 9/11 another episode in the long history of the Western domination of the world, or did it open up a new era in the genealogy of terrorism; was it the beginning of a new kind of war, not fought among established nations, no longer directed at the rogue states of the axis of evil but against landless non-state organizations? These questions made up the basic building blocks of the French 9/11 debate. STAGE THEORY AND THE POST - 9/11 CULTURE WARS

The “culture wars” in Western democracies that preceded the 9/11 debate provide a context for its conflicting interpretations, all the way to recent developments such as the election of Donald Trump, the pro-Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and the prolonged “yellow vests” social movement in France (2018–19). Some analysts have framed the culture wars along the historicized categories of premodern, modern, and postmodern, as well as in reference to the work of structural-developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Jean Gebser, Clare Graves, James Fowler, and Carrol Gilligan in areas as diverse as cognitive growth, moral development, cultural history, and religious studies. Despite some theoretical and methodological differences, these authors all identified in their respective areas of study a half dozen or so successive levels of individual and collective evolutionary unfolding of human consciousness. Piaget distinguished sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages of cognitive development in children, based on the formation of language and symbolic thinking from age two to seven, followed by the emergence of concepts attached to concrete situations and notions of time, space, and quantity from age seven to eleven and the subsequent growth to abstract logic and reasoning beyond the age of eleven. Kohlberg defined three major levels of moral development: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional, each one com-

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prised of two distinct stages through which children move from an externally controlled sense of morality based on the unquestioned acceptance of authority figures, to increasingly internalized conformist conceptions of interpersonal and societal relationships, to a highly personal ethical sense based on abstract principles and values leading to the challenge of unjust expectations, norms, and laws. Carol Gilligan, a student of Kohlberg, questioned the gender and racial bias of his work (his subjects were mostly white male children and adults) and argued that men’s moral development was based on notions of justice, while women relied primarily on the ethics of community, care, and compassion. James W. Fowler applied some of Piaget and Kohlberg’s findings to religion, identifying for his part six major stages of faith involving traditional creeds, alternative spiritualities, or secular world views. In the first stage (“intuitive-projective”), preschoolers form a basic conception of God from the teachings of their parents and other adults by mixing fantasy and reality. In the next phase (“mythic-literal”), preteens develop an understanding of the stories told to them by their faith community in very literal ways, while teenagers move to a “synthetic-conventional” level where they acquire an unquestioned, all-encompassing belief system relying on a stable institution or community. Some of the young adults who grow into the abstract and rational “individual-reflective” stage become aware of other belief systems and start questioning their own as well as the existence of a divine power. In mid-life, a small group of these seekers and doubters may enter the “conjunctive” phase of faith development, returning to sacred stories and symbols while rejecting authoritarian, intolerant, and conformist views of the religious. Fowler’s spectrum of spiritual evolution ends with the “universalizing” stage shared by an even smaller group of individuals who, as opposed to traditionalists, fundamentalists and literalists, share an inclusive, open-minded acceptance of the diversity of belief systems in human history and democratic social formations. Jean Gebser transferred the notion of developmental models from the individual (ontogenetic) to the collective (phylogenetic), defining five major structures of cultural evolution: archaic, magic, mythic, mental/rational, and integral (Gebser 1986). Ken Wilber, whose own “integral” theory has been strongly influenced by Gebser, describes the mythic-literal world view shared by religious fundamentalists and ethnic nationalists alike as authoritarian, conformist,

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hierarchical, patriarchal, dogmatic, and territorial. Ethnocentric ideologies advocating racial supremacy, national-populist beliefs, and closed religious systems are based on strict binary oppositions and irreconcilable differences (“us and them,” “my tribe, community, race, religion, party, country right or wrong,” etc.) that make any pluralistic view of the legitimate community inconceivable, leading to the othering of various kinds of infidels, apostates, heretics, foreigners, and traitors, all inside and outside threats to the community that need to be summarily dispatched in the name of the one and only God or Nation. As Wilber puts it in the context of post-9/11 terrorism, Islamists are hardly the only carriers of mythic-literal subcultures, since they share fundamental ideological traits with “Southern Baptists blowing up abortion clinics in the South [of the United States], Buddhists putting poison sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, Pakistani Muslims and Indian Hindus [waging] border warfare, or Catholics and Protestants [committing] atrocities in Northern Ireland” (Wilber 2017, 79). According to the genealogical framework of structural-developmental theory, the universalist outlook that today’s liberals and civic nationalists have inherited from the Enlightenment, the French and American revolutions, and the ensuing republican traditions illustrate the next stage of cultural evolution, the mental-rational, formal-operational, and post-conventional levels found in Gebser, Piaget, and Kohlberg, respectively. World views associated with the Age of Reason, the Industrial Revolution, and the overthrow of absolutist monarchical institutions and traditionalist, caste-based social and religious systems have since favoured personal achievement, individual merit, and citizens’ rights, humanistic secularism, the separation of church and state, free speech, economic and technical progress, capitalism, scientific materialism and philosophical positivism, and universal ethics. For many contemporary developmentalists such as Wilber, the 1960s saw the emergence of a postmodern, third wave of global transcultural movements including Green politics, the struggles against systemic racism, religious bigotry, and neocolonialism, and the denunciation of the Western (or Northern) imposition of “epistemic violence” on dominated cultures across the globe in the name of falsely universalized paradigms. This “world-centric” stage combines radical egalitarianism, cultural relativism, a robust belief in diversity and inclusion, the promotion of gender equity, “identity politics” and group rights, the defence of racial and sexual minorities and margin-

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alized and Indigenous communities, and a solid distrust of philosophical essentialism and foundational theories of truth produced in Europe and the United States during the rational stage. In the French context, the first constellation includes identitaires, souverainistes, and Catholic traditionalists, the second secularist and universalist néorépublicains, and the third communautaristes, antiracistes, and décoloniaux, all components of the post-9/11 political and ideological struggles documented in this book. The tripartite structure of the current religion and culture wars opposing ethnocentric, universalist, and multiculturalist ideologies is rendered more complex by the fact that each of these world views shares some common elements with the others, albeit for differing sets of reasons, interests, and strategies linked to the legacies of their specific historical period of emergence. For example, traditionalists and globalists contend that the Enlightenment went too far: rationalistic universals destroyed both ancien régime institutions in Europe and Indigenous cultures in the rest of the world. Authoritarian fundamentalists and egalitarian culturalists are equally anti-modern but for different reasons, since modernity has meant the concurrent rise of liberalism at home (bad, for the right) and imperialism abroad (wrong, for the left) as evidenced, for example, by the colonial expansion of the French anti-clerical Third Republic in Africa and southeast Asia. Meanwhile, universalists and differentialists alike share a common aversion for the xenophobia, superstitious beliefs, and autocratic leanings of the proponents of mythic-literal conceptions of the desirable community. Although the emphasis on collective identity is common to the strongly exclusionary (premodern), conditionally inclusive (modern), and radically inclusive (postmodern) paradigms, their supporters differ sharply on the nature of the group legitimately endowed with these rights: only whites for white supremacists and co-religionists for Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or Muslim fundamentalists; only citizens, naturalized and/or native-born for civic nationalists; and “all of us, not just some of us” for proponents of radical democracy. The debate as it unfolded in France informed not only novel-writing and conspiratorial thinking in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but was also transferred to subsequent periods, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the major terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016 in Paris and Nice. While the “anti-anti-Americans” discussed in chapter 4 espoused neoconservative views on the need to fight terrorism by exporting democracy to the Muslim world through regime change,

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critical theorists such as Badiou, Rancière, and Derrida remained faithful to the poststructuralist linguistic turn and went on deconstructing Western-centred paradigms of empire.1 Meanwhile, neo-Gaullist souverainistes rallied behind Jacques Chirac’s resistance to American hegemony, taking to task “post-national liberals” such as Lévy and Bernard Kouchner for aligning with United States foreign policy in the name of a misguided “universal religion of human rights.”2 A decade later, the spectacular, but short-lived, “hashtag” mass movement following the murders in the office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo provided a striking illustration of the world-centric, cosmopolitan ideology described by some adepts of stage theory. Millions of marchers in France and abroad took to the streets advocating tolerance, inclusion, acceptance of diversity, and solidarity with the victims, holding posters that proclaimed “I am Charlie, I am Jewish, I am Muslim, I am Christian, I am an atheist, I am a police officer, I am a journalist, I am French, I am human.” Meanwhile, civic nationalist critics of “Charlie” such as Emmanuel Todd denounced the movement as the elitist crusade of liberal intellectuals, civil servants, and well-to-do suburban retirees who were happily sacrificing the democratic ideals of the French republic on the altar of their economic self-interest and cultural privilege in the name of some fake, and hypocritical, Voltairean tolerance (Todd 2015b). SETTING THE STAGE : THE MEDIA

On 13 September, Jean-Marie Colombani, then editor-in-chief of Le Monde, published a piece entitled “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We Are All Americans) in which he outlined most of what would become the main themes, parameters, and dividing lines of the debate (Colombani 2001a). “In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel,” Colombani wrote, “the first thing that comes to mind is this: we are all Americans!” (Colombani 2002, 153).3 The universalization of the American plight as a basis for transnational solidarity promptly drew critical reactions from those who feared that identification with its victimized citizenry might legitimize unconditional support for the United States’ economic, cultural, and military dominance in the world. First of all, many of those who had died in Manhattan were not Americans. Toni Negri and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, among others, contested the validity

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of Colombani’s statement. Negri opposed the inclusivity of a modern city such as New York to the exclusivity of a national(ist) identification with the country where the event had taken place: “I don’t think that we can say that we are all Americans. I do think, however, that we’re all New Yorkers ... If we’re all New Yorkers, it’s not because we accept American culture, but because we accept the culture of New York, the culture of the melting-pot” (Truc 2018, 35). Philosopher Jean-Paul Dollé also begged to differ with the statement, writing in 2002 that “we are not all Americans, we are New Yorkers” (Dollé 2002, 101). Cohn-Bendit echoed both comments after the Madrid bombings of 2004: “There was some confusion after the 9/11 attacks. We shouldn’t have said ‘We are all Americans,’ but ‘We are all New Yorkers.’ Right now, I’m not saying that we are all Spaniards, but that we are all Madrilenians. It’s not the same thing” (Truc 2018, 35). The criticism was not entirely fair, since the second sentence of Colombani’s article had argued that “we are all New Yorkers, just as certainly as John Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in Berlin in 1962” (Colombani 2001, 153). Kennedy’s statement was of course eminently political in the context of the Cold War, and “We are all Americans” also became highly political as the immediate feeling of empathy for the plight of fellow humans soon gave way to the prolonged ideological conflicts examined in this book. Colombani’s front-page editorial not only produced one of the most enduring slogans of the post-9/11 era, given its author’s influential position at the intersection of the intellectual and journalistic fields (Le Monde remains the venue of choice for those who wish to weigh in on the debate of ideas in France), but it also introduced into the conversation some of the major issues that would be discussed again and again in the country and beyond in the following months. The very title of the article put French–American relations, and the eternally resurging question of Gallic anti-Americanism, squarely at the centre of the contested afterlives of September 11. The challenge inherent in any attempt to make sense of the event would involve two other major topics: its radical novelty on the one hand and, on the other, the possibility to frame the catastrophe within some kind of discursive logic. The two options were in some ways incompatible: if 9/11 was wholly unheard of, if it was a radical break with the course of history or the realm of the conceptual, then what was the point of debating its origins, its current representations, and its future conse-

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quences? These recurring motifs can be found in many of the accounts reviewed in the following pages. Taken together, they make up the intertextuality of September 11. The chronology of the event, in the second year of the first century of a new millennium, became a perfect metaphor for its unparalleled nature. “How can we not be immediately struck by this realization: the new century has arrived,” Colombani asked on the night of the attacks, which “mark[ed] the ushering in a new age that seems so far from the promise and hope of another historic day, 9 November 1989, and another somewhat euphoric year, 2000, which we thought might end with peace in the Middle East ... The beginnings of this century defy understanding” (ibid.). And yet, the mention of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which signalled both the end of a decade and the conclusion of what François Furet called the two-hundred-year revolutionary cycle ushered in on Bastille Day 1789, provided some kind of continuity to the so-called new era dawning on the world. 9/11 was contrasted with the period that preceded it, the end of the Cold War and the expectations it had raised because it seemingly rid the world of extremist ideologies. Similarly, the references to the war of 1812 during which “the British army destroyed the White House” and to Pearl Harbor (which George Bush had mentioned in his first public statement) somewhat belied the fact that the United States had never been attacked on its own soil. The subsequent interpretations of 9/11 would draw a long list of interrelated memories of other historical moments designed to test the uniqueness of the event, including instances when the United States had been the target of military strikes (again, Pearl Harbor) or had been their source (the nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the allied bombings of Dresden and other German cities in 1945). In time, the collapse of the WTC towers would serve as a (contested) interpretive model for subsequent terrorist acts in major Western capitals – Madrid, London, and Paris. Colombani mentioned “an unprecedented shock” (156) while wondering whether the hijackers’ “murderous madness” was totally irrational or whether it followed “a certain logic, obviously a barbaric logic, a new nihilism that is repugnant to the great majority of those who believe in Islam ... but it is a political logic which, by going to extremes, seeks to force Muslims to ‘choose sides’ against those who are usually designated as ‘the Great Satan’” (159). The editorial prompted other topics of discussion that

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would find their way into future narratives: the role of technology in the new context of global warfare; the responsibility of the United States in their own vulnerability by funding, training, and arming the future al-Qaeda fighters during their conflict with the USSR in Afghanistan (“the suicidal pact with the Devil” Faustian motif); and the collapse of the US-dominated post–Cold War unilateralism of the 1990s (the now discredited “end of history” narrative about the definitive triumph of liberal democracy). On 27 December, three and a half months after his first article, Le Monde’s editor-in-chief published another piece that differed considerably from his initial comments. Once again, the title “A nos amis Américains” (To Our American Friends) was significant: not only had the relationship with America moved from identification to friendship, but the friendship in question included some serious reservations and quite a bit of finger-wagging. The retaliatory invasion of Afghanistan in the fall and the subsequent defeat of the Taliban after their refusal to hand over bin Laden had been decisive, swift, and successful, but that was exactly the problem and a cause for concern: “Already, a question arises. Is it too much? Too fast? Too strong? Aren’t the Americans in turn, after having been so cruelly and so strongly shaken, dizzy with their own success, caught up by their hyperpower? ... Is America going to disappoint by dubious battles and risky backward steps?” (Colombani 2001b, 160). At the time, the attention was fast becoming focused on Iraq and the increasing possibility of a military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime as a result of what the author called America’s “resentment and arrogance,” threatening to throw the entire Middle East into chaos. In order to avoid such an outcome, he argued, “the perspective of a lasting peace demands of Americans to forsake triumphalism” (162). Most of the arguments put forward by the Chirac administration to justify its opposition to the planned invasion of Iraq a year later were already laid out in Colombani’s warning against the sabrerattling in the White House. The United States needed to put peace before justice (the original name of the Global War on Terrorism was Operation Enduring Justice) while taking into account the viewpoint of its NATO allies and avoiding a return to unilateralism as a form of isolationism (164). Mondialisation implied that “the United States has duties toward other countries” and the Bush administration would be well advised to help its public opinion, “legitimately disoriented by the sudden

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awareness of their vulnerability,” to realize that “we do not live in a single world, that we need to build multiple partnerships, and that the planet does not look like a play-station” (164). New York City surfaced again as the symbol of what was at stake in the struggle between cosmopolitics and a jingoistic nationalism, paving the way once again to a conservative backlash in the vast hinterland of America. “If the entire world has recognized itself in martyred New York, it is because the city reflects a totally different image from that of a powerful country, even less that of an imperial presidency: the city embodies cosmopolitanism, it is an open city, a planetary city” (163). In other words, if to proclaim “we are all New Yorkers” still made sense (but for how long?), “We are all Americans” was definitely a thing of the past. The reactions to his first editorial prompted Colombani to publish a thin volume of reflections a few months later in which he returned to his initial reactions and expanded them into comments prompted by recent developments such as the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in January 2002. The title of the new book was not We Are All Americans!, as could have been expected, but Tous Américains? Le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (All Americans? The World after 11 September 2001). The emphatic exclamation mark of the initial statement supporting a victimized people had been replaced by a question mark, a sign of the author’s evolution from emotional solidarity to critical distance in a matter of weeks. In the prologue, he wondered whether a text written on the spur of the moment, during the very night following the tragedy, “was anything but the manifestation of an absolute and necessary compassion?” (Colombani 2002, 7). “I can’t stop asking myself this question,” he went on, “not so much because of the criticisms and challenges generated by the text but because of the course of events itself. Between September 11 and, let’s say, 5 February 2002, the shock has been so powerful! The march of history so fast-paced! Between the collapse of the Twin Towers and these images of Guantanamo Bay, the American military base in Cuba where the first al-Qaeda prisoners are being jailed and deprived of any rights, what happened? ... Should we conclude that the American president wished to remind us of Clémenceau’s famous statement: military justice is to justice what military music is to music? And so, still ‘All Americans’? This book is not born of the author’s remorse but rather of the necessity to go further, to clarify a statement that was not solely the product of circumstance” (8). Like the growing cohort

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of opinion-makers reacting to the tragedy at the time, Colombani felt the need to replace affect with analysis, to insert the surprise of the event, its perceived absolute exteriority, within his own explanatory framework, adding yet another contribution to the ever-expanding system of interpretations. From the start, the new book attempted to strike a balance between the two previous editorials, stressing that “we are still, all of us, Americans” while expressing concern about the United States’ temptation to overreact: “For those who think that emotion cannot dissipate the awareness of the seriousness of the situation born of September 11 ... we must keep asserting that we were all – and we still all are – Americans. Of course, we need to specify immediately what kind of America we support, but we must tirelessly repeat why anti-Americanism has become dangerous before we attempt to discern how far the shock wave caused by September 11 can go” (17). To call 9/11 “a shock wave,” a term borrowed from physics to describe a turbulent, propagating disturbance moving through a medium at a greater speed than sound, provided a perfect metaphor for the “supersonic” speed with which the news of the explosion of the towers had travelled across the globe and the continued reverberation of their geopolitical consequences. For Colombani, unconditional pro-Americanism and anti-Americanism would be equally dangerous, if only because 9/11 remained “a turning point in the life of the planet” and “the war against terrorism will be, for all of us, a permanent feature of the years to come” (16). With the passage of time, public opinion might forget the plane that had struck the Pentagon (the declaration of war) and focus only on the towers (the human tragedy), failing to remember the nature of the threat and its dual targets, modernity and democracy. The liberaldemocratic intellectual must remain the keeper of that memory against all the actors and supporters of political Islam’s “conservative revolution,” whose extreme version in bin Laden’s project aimed at “the conflagration of the world and the reconstitution in this apocalyptic manner of a caliphate that would stand up to the entire universe: a demented millenarian vision similar to the one conceived by the Hitlerian regime” (19), the unexpected rise (or resurgence) in the heart of modernity of a “hysterical conservatism” bent on world domination through mass murder (21). Colombani used his familiarity with both the journalistic and intellectual fields to paint a detailed picture of three interrelated developments in recent French–American relations: the need to distinguish

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two kinds of anti-Americanism (extremist vs circumstantial), the changing nature of the United States’ position in the world, and the reorganization of intellectual politics in France after the Soviets’ intervention in Afghanistan (1979–89). Championing democratic modernity in the face of a new form of megalomaniac proto-fascism required addressing the question of the “true face of America, the one our parents found to be liberating and generous on the beaches of Normandy or the one we saw in Vietnam” (9). Colombani went on to catalogue “the horror gallery of the American-style Cold War” (52), opposing the “ethical superego” of the European leaders of the time to the repressed Id of anti-communism illustrated by the long list of ruthless dictators the United States propped up in southern Europe and Latin America: Batista, Pinochet, Videla, Franco, and Salazar. The third part of the Freudian psyche, the Ego of America, remained for its part unstable: “For lack of having undertaken a genuine critical reflection on the darkest zones of its memory, [the United States] is condemned, in the beginning of the 21st century, to a loose identity” (53), no longer a superpower but not yet inclined to accept the multipolar world emerging from the end of the Cold War. Rejecting “any unconditional endorsement of the American model” (54) while supporting the United States in the hope that it will change, the critic relied on a “circumstantial” kind of antiAmericanism, distinct from the absolutist versions of the nationalist right and the communist left of yesteryear. The fine line of critical support meant to oppose the neoliberal backlash of the Reagan years, deregulation and the assault on the welfare state, the Babbitt-like alliance of Wall Street and Main Street, and the rise of a “securitarianindustrial complex” in the face of terrorism (55), while at the same time acknowledging “the historical dimension of the United States: to represent for democracy a hope, if not an ideal” (59), the hope of a possible return to the country’s Rooseveltian roots and the “socialdemocratization of America” (66). The book concluded with a short account of the restructuration of the French world of ideas that followed “the break of intellectuals from all over the European West with pro-Soviet ‘progressivism’” (115). The author interestingly dated the ideological shift from 1979, the first year of the decade-long war waged by the USSR against Islamist insurgents opposed to the puppet communist regime in Kabul, thereby connecting the Middle East, and by implication September 11, with the collapse of Stalinism in eastern Europe and the

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declining influence of Marxism on the Western intelligentsia. The first Gulf War (1990) confirmed for Colombani the role played by the geopolitics of the Arab world in the decade-long emergence of this “new intellectual party of democratic globalization and human rights.” Returning to its origins in the Dreyfus Affair, the new intelligentsia denounced Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in spite of France’s support of the secular regime in Baghdad, placed the respect of international law and institutions above national sovereignty, and rejected “some of the usual prejudices against American democracy” (121). Bernard-Henry Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médicins Sans Frontières (known in the English-speaking world as Doctors Without Borders) figured prominently in the story of the new Dreyfusards defending, like their forebears, humanitarian universal justice against the raison d’état. Many members of this new intellectual party, renewing the rhetoric of the first Gulf War (1990), would join the ranks of the “anti-anti-Americans” for the second act of regime change in Iraq in 2003, as we shall see in chapter 4. The kind of reasoned solidarity with the American people Colombani had advocated six months earlier had not lasted, however. After the first few weeks of compassionate mourning, many voices soon rose in support of the hijackers as part of what Le Monde’s editor-inchief dismissed as a disparate coalition of pacifists and defeatists, “visceral” and “resentful” anti-Americans, Third-World populists, cultural relativists, national-republican champions of the French exception, and all those who surrendered to an “aestheticization of terrorism” close to a kind of “fascist pornography” (136). His last words to those who emphatically stated that they were definitely not Americans was that “the fascism of the poor is no less a fascism” (144) and that “if one refuses to abandon the victims, if one wants to defend justice, there is no alternative to military response” (145). APOCALYPSE NOW ?

Jean-Marie Colombani was not the only influential journalist to publish his reaction to 9/11 within a few months following the attacks. While Colombani adopted a neoliberal, left-of-centre globalist assessment of the US response that struck a balance between pro-authoritarian and democratic trends in American foreign policy since 1945, Adler, a former colleague of Colombani’s at Le Monde now writing for rightist Le Figaro, advocated a neoconservative support of the Bush administra-

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tion’s military intervention in Afghanistan (in his 2002 book) and later in Iraq. The combination of shared and opposite views between the two men illustrated the tensions within the highest intellectual and journalist circles in the country regarding the war on terror, tensions that replicated the major fissures of the “culture wars” described earlier. While Colombani painted a universalist, idealistic picture of Western democracies as defenders and promoters of human rights, Adler expressed nationalistic, realpolitik views on the need to respond uncompromisingly to the threat of l’islamo-fascisme under US leadership if need be. The title of Alexander Adler’s J’ai vu mourir le monde ancien (I Witnessed the Ancient World Perish) left no doubt as to his conviction that 9/11 indeed marked the end of an era, and his argument throughout the essay, as is often the case in France, combined geopolitical analyses with broader philosophical and historical considerations. “Yes, the horrendous spectacle of 11 September 2001 was truly an apocalypse, in the original, Greek sense of the word, a revelation of our world,” he wrote in the opening paragraph of his book, “but as all previous revelations, the light emanating from it is much too bright to show anything but itself” (Adler 2002, 7). We notice here once again the visual metaphors mentioned earlier: 9/11 was an epochmaking event whose true meaning remained hidden despite its hypervisibility in the media, and the conceptual void they left behind could only be filled with “ordinary prejudice, ideologies, or worse yet, resentments” (7). The “effect of light we had to endure,” Adler went on, “was nothing but a new and blinding illumination that in the first instance obscured our gaze as efficiently as the darkness that fell on Manhattan ... Six months later ... it is remarkable to note the extent to which so many fundamental elements of the new situation, in particular those of a political nature, remain opaque” (8). Which would explain the author’s insistence on the absence of any “structuring thought about the phenomena” under discussion and the “hypothetical nature” of some of the positions he would take in the following 300-plus pages devoted to the geopolitics of the new era. The use of the term apocalypse, hardly original in accounts of 9/11, is in this case highly paradoxical, since the word derives, as Adler rightly pointed out, from the Greek verb Apokalyptein (to uncover, to disclose), which is exactly what the blinding light of the event failed to do. What kind of revelation ends up masking its own meaning, unless some kind of religious, metaphysical context is brought to bear on the

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analysis, which Adler was apparently not prepared to do, at least until the final page of his essay in which he prophetically mentioned the possibility of yet another apocalypse if the United States and Israel failed to avoid the total war called for by bin Laden. America needed to learn, “in this difficult context, to move from a hot war through various spasms, to a manoeuvred cold war that would allow short operations in the Afghan model. Israel, retreating behind borders that it will defend and choose on its own, will then be able to call for general mobilization, threaten Syria and Egypt directly, and provide a discreet and implicit support to the moderate wing of the Palestinian movement” (335). If, on the other hand, Americans and Israeli were to fall “head first in the trap that is laid out for them today, the battle will be merciless but will end up producing in any case the same result at a higher cost: the end of the long process of democratization of the world is indeed close to the plain of Armaggedon” (336). Armaggedon is mentioned in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation as the place where the kings of the earth under demonic leadership will wage a final war against God’s forces at the end of times. Scholars have suggested that the word means Hill of Meggido in Hebrew, a reference to the ruins of present-day Tel Meggido, a town in ancient Palestine overlooking the Valley of Jezreel, about eighteen miles southeast of the port of Haifa in present-day northern Israel. In biblical times, the place enjoyed a strategic location at the crossing of military and trade routes connecting Egypt to Mesopotamia by way of Syria and the Phoenician cities of the Levant with Jerusalem and the Jordan River Valley. “Armaggedon” is the last word, literally and figuratively, of Adler’s text, linking (like the ancient roadways of the Orient leading to the sacred sites of the three religions of the book) the past, present, and future of 9/11 as a sacred or profane ground for total war. The prophecy mixed the memories of ancient times with the most lethal products of modernity, commercial planes turned into missiles and weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, or cybernetic. Which “ancient world” was the title of Adler’s book referring to, the one where John of Patmos wrote the Book of Revelation or the sixty-year-long period of American leadership 9/11 was threatening to end? In the acknowledgment section of the book, the author expressed his gratitude to “my friend Jean-Marie Colombani, one of the faithful and patient participants in my countless lucubrations” for giving them “an increasingly human form” (6). The two colleagues (Adler

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was at the time an associate editor at Le Monde) did indeed share many viewpoints in their respective contributions to the cultural politics of 9/11, including contempt for systematic Americanophobia. “Not only did the spectacle of New York as a martyred city,” Adler remarked, “not affect the anti-Americanism of the Western European ‘chattering classes,’ but it even seems to have fuelled their latent sadism against a power becoming vulnerable in their eyes” (7). Both men also agreed that the targeting of Manhattan and Washington, DC, had confirmed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prediction that the North American continent would soon no longer be an island and that the United States would, like Britain, be deprived of the once splendid isolation from foreign occupation that Europe, coextensive with Asia, had never experienced. “After having lost, because of terrorism, the sanctuarization of their national territory once secured by a double dissuasion (nuclear/high intensity and naval/low intensity),” Adler wondered, “are Americans thrust into the bitter experience of an endless conflict? That is what George W. Bush has for his mission to prevent by all means” (26). The end of the politics of nuclear dissuasion that had prevented the destruction of the world during the Cold War provided additional evidence of the radical novelty of the post-9/11 era, even if the worst had been avoided. “Let’s imagine for an instant that the planes of 11 September had carried in their hold a ‘dirty bomb’ of the kind the Pakistani nuclear scientists had thought to put together on behalf of Osama bin Laden. Would the leaders of al-Qaeda have drawn nuclear fire upon themselves? Probably not.” Adler also wondered whether “the new strategic directives adopted by the United States a few months after 11 September refer to an expanded use of nuclear armament in order to retaliate, in the case of a bacteriological attack, for example.” Although legitimate, the new response might not be as dissuasive as the Cold War balance of power (22). Although Adler and Colombani covered a lot of the same ground, from French intellectual politics to transatlantic relations and geostrategic analyses, initial differences in their approaches would prove politically salient in the following years. A Maoist in his youth and later a member of the French Communist Party, Adler continued his rightward trajectory after the publication of his book, leaving Le Monde for the centre-right magazines L’Express and Le Point to end up as a member of the editorial board of the very conservative Le Figaro. He supported Bush against Gore in the 2000 US presidential election

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and sided with neoconservative policies leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while Colombani favoured Kerry a year later, a parting of ways already perceptible in their accounts of 9/11. They may have shared the same adversaries (Islamists and their supporters in the West), but they hardly agreed on what constituted “the true face” of America. While Colombani drew a sharp contrast between the New Deal and Reagan’s neoliberal backlash, Adler insisted that American foreign policy since the 1930s was the result of a “synthesis” between the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. The leadership of the free world had required merging the best of democratic messianism and realpolitik pragmatism, Wilsonian interventionism in the name of international human rights, and the backing of the ruthless anticommunist dictatorships Colombani had condemned as the Cold War’s museum of horrors. In Adler’s view, at the onset of World War II, “the best of the republican and democratic ideologies were combined. The pro-British republicans claimed that ‘America is a power like the others. She should not practise naive moralism (angélisme) ... If we tolerate the domination of Europe by Germany, it will threaten the shores of America in a few years.’ This was the Machiavellian realist ideology of the State endorsed today by Henry Kissinger” (58). Like many French Atlanticists past and present, Adler combined a realistic, and hence often forgiving, sense of the usefulness of American military might to protect the free world, regardless of the inevitable human and moral “collateral damages” of such demonstrations of force, with a condescending view of some aspects of American culture. He mentioned, for example, “the infantile and moving side” of the country’s religious ethos, “based on the quest for a second chance ... the born-again world view of the Baptists, whose conquering symbol is the frequent baptism allowing one to ‘start again’ toward a new life” (48). The childish optimism and goodness of “the basic American ideology” and the fact that “they don’t know much about the life of other societies” meant that Americans “do not feel any hostility toward the outside world,” unlike Latin Americans, for example, who hate their neighbours to the north (49). This was another fundamental error shared by critiques of the United States: “American society, whatever they say, ignores the hatred of the other one can encounter in the Balkans, for example” (51). As a result, it was wrong to claim that American foreign policy was imperialist and expansionist: while China was “dilating,” the United States was “retracting,” evidence that “less than ever, they are not the Empire

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complacently described to us” (15). As a matter of fact, “after living in the illusion of absolute power during the Clinton years, intervening in all places and out of place, America has rediscovered that it had borders ... enemies, vulnerabilities, allies ... in short, it has become a nation once again and will be tomorrow a more social nation, a nation more rigorously respectful of the law” (15–16). A year before the invasion of Iraq, the author approvingly quoted Donald Rumsfeld, setting the scene for the French neoconservatives’ rallying behind their American counterparts. America is not a hegemon; it is under attack and entitled to defend herself and should not be blamed for her desire to do so, regardless of the probable excesses of her reaction. “The pacifists and the defeatists who speculate that the United States will become weary after their early successes in Afghanistan and will give up on their strategic objectives regarding terrorism,” Adler warned, “fail to gauge the extent to which, from the bottom to the top of society, the Americans have become aware of the danger ... When the anti-terrorist campaign stops, the terrorist threat will still exist. And so, the United States will go all the way. It can’t stop because the terrorists do not negotiate. It will indeed eventually turn the hot war into a cold one by containing the Arab world, but not without having gone to extremes here and there” (38). Adler agreed that al-Qaeda’s leader must be “rendered harmless” (mis hors d’état de nuire) (332) because his victory would mean the end of Saudi Arabia, the nuclearization of Pakistan, a total calling into question of Israel’s security, and a death sentence for all the so-called moderate Muslim regimes, allied or in relations with the United States, from Egypt to Bangladesh and perhaps even Indonesia. “If one does not consider this as a reason for war, then there isn’t any. All that’s left is to turn the United States into a kind of New Age community (une communauté de type ‘Lanza del Vasto’) or to adopt Islam as the official religion by getting rid of the Constitution of 1787, all decisions which, by the way, would not satisfy Osama bin Laden” (42). Even dead, the spectre of public enemy number one would still haunt the Americans with the threat of being bogged down in an endemic conflict, an “Israelization on a global scale” that would “drain their resources, their moral poise, and even their global credibility” (28). But there was no alternative, for such is the price of leadership and the expectations of clients, mentees, and protégés. As Robert Kagan would argue two years later in his Of Power and Paradise: America and Europe in the New World Order, after Iraq had become another

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Vietnam-like “quagmire,” the United States, unlike Europe, would continue to be hopelessly mired in history, condemned to meeting the challenge of yet another clash of civilizations in which Islamic radicalism would have taken the place of the Soviet enemy.4 REGIONAL CONFLICT OR GLOBAL ISLAM ?

Prominent media figures were not the only contributors to the post 9/11 debate, of course, given the close collaboration in the media between scholars invited as “experts” and professional journalists. The demand for interpretation that followed September 11 enabled specialists of the geopolitics and cultural history of Islam to enter the fray, often with the same conflicting views on the causes and consequences of global terrorism as media professionals such as Colombani and Adler had displayed in their editorial columns or on televised talk shows. Olivier Roy, a political scientist specializing in international relations and the Muslim world, proposed a somewhat iconoclastic contribution to the debate in a book called Les illusions du onze septembre. Le Débat stratégique face au terrorisme, also published in 2002. Trained in philosophy and Persian language and culture, Roy has held academic positions in some of the most renowned institutions of higher education in France, from CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) to EHESS (École des Hautes études en sciences sociales) and IEP (Institut d’études politiques de Paris, or “Sciences Po”). One of his early essays, The Failure of Political Islam (1994), had already argued that there was only a tenuous connection between political Islam (Islamism) as a response to modernity and traditional religious texts, law, and culture of the Muslim world, a decoupling of religiosity and politics that would raise vigorous criticisms from those who see Islamism as deeply rooted in the Salafist tradition and its growing influence among French Muslim communities. The issue would surface again in the aftermath of the 2015 mass murders in Paris in the form of a controversy involving the role of religious fundamentalism in the rise of homegrown terrorism among French youth (see chapter 6). In illusions of September 11, Roy questioned from the start the dominant interpretation of 9/11 as a foundational event comparable, for example, to the fall of the USSR. Terrorism was hardly a new phenomenon, and the unprecedented nature of the attacks did not reside in the tactics used by the hijackers. Although many analysts argued that

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the originality of the operation lay in the privatization of weapons of mass destruction by stateless actors, September 11 remained for Roy a “classical” act of “kamikaze” action, similar to those perpetrated in 1983 and 1984 against American and French forces by suicide bombers in Lebanon. He reminded his readers that coordinated plane hijacking had been used as a technique since 1970 and that the World Trade Center had already been the target of a bombing attempt by al-Qaeda in February 1993. Roy also insisted, as did many others, on the visual component of the event as a key to its originality. “What makes 11 September appear as new,” he noted in his introduction, “is that one literally visualizes all at once, at a single glance, what could be the use of WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] by a terrorist group. But the novelty is in the perception of the danger, not in its concrete implementation” (Roy 2002, 10). I will address in the next chapter the unique role played by the contested visibility (and in some extreme cases even actual occurrence) of the event as a result of the manipulative effects of the technologies of virtual reality. The other element contributing to the novelty of 9/11 was the fact that it had struck at the heart of the American territory, institutions, and symbols. One had to go back to the Civil War to find as many casualties in a single day. As a consequence, the American government “has declared ‘a war against terrorism’ and made it the exclusive criterion of its entire foreign policy: ‘those who are not with us are against us,’” and this strategic choice had come to dominate the debate in France (10), which Roy summed up as the confrontation between two distinct views calling for widely different responses. Either the world was now dealing with the “new spectre haunting the Western world,” i.e., international terrorism, a global and largely irrational phenomenon not uniquely linked to Islam and pursuing an apocalyptic strategy by means of weapons of mass destruction, or 9/11 was simply a direct consequence of the conflict in the Middle East, causing Arab youth, “outraged by the American stranglehold on the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples, [to] rise up under the banner of Islam in a desperate struggle” (11). Roy’s analysis once again underscored the opposition between America and Europe regarding the nature of the new threat. Were the Europeans, he wondered, spectators, allies, hostages, or accomplices? The invisibility of the enemy, an underground transnational network of loosely affiliated organizations, allowed the White House to promote the first option (the war on terror), which conveniently enabled

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the United States “to rethink the conflict in moral terms: right and democracy against the obscure forces of evil” (11) and made it easier to avoid questioning the roots of the conflict. Europe, on the contrary, tended to see the sources of al-Qaeda’s actions strictly in terms of the Middle East, insisting on the necessity of finding a compromise solution to the two major unresolved conflicts in the region, Palestine and Iraq, with the view that negotiation is aimed at reaching peace rather than justice. While a large fraction of European public opinion supported the involvement in Afghanistan as a legitimate instance of counter-terrorism, the same was not true of the axis of evil rhetoric used to justify invading Iraq. Roy related these transatlantic differences to conflicting approaches regarding the nature of Islam. The European position rested on a complex combination of religiosity, secularism, colonialism, immigration, and racialized exclusion that made little sense on the other side of the Atlantic, where “the IsraeliPalestinian conflict structure[d] the debate” (70), in part because the Christian Right in America increasingly supported “the Judaization of Palestine as a first step toward the Christianization of the world” (59), a development I will return to in chapter 5 in relation to the perception of evangelicals during the Iraq war. In addition, most Arab Americans were Christians and belonged to the middle classes, while 80 per cent of Muslim-Americans had voted for George W. Bush in 2000, a consequence of the alliance among Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim conservatives in the United States on issues of abortion or sexual orientation (62). Roy’s thesis, which he acknowledged to be in the minority among scholars of Islam, differed from both of the dominant interpretations of 9/11 he had identified. The reasons for 9/11 were not to be found in Islam per se or in the Middle East, “even if of course these two dimensions overdetermine both al-Qaeda’s discourse and the interpretation of the movement,” nor did they reside “in an abstract and metaphysical model of the new evil” (13). In his view, al-Qaeda was “situated at the junction between Islamic radicalization and a heightened anti-imperialist challenge, delocalized by globalization, i.e., displaced from the Middle East and its conflicts” (13). This notion of a globalized Islam would surface again following the 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris. The debate would then oppose 1) supporters of the central role of religious extremism in the genesis of homegrown terrorism among young French Muslims, 2) proponents of socio-economic and ideological factors (racism, discrimination, anti-imperialism, etc.) and

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3) Roy himself as partisan of a third approach based on the “Islamization of radicalism” whereby the Islamist rhetoric is simply a convenient cover for new forms of nihilistic violence (see chapter 6). Roy’s view of 9/11 rested on the fact that the threat was not only external: the hijackers had been recruited and trained in the West, their planes belonged to US companies and had left from American airports, and the second generation of al-Qaeda warriors were “reIslamized” individuals who had been radicalized in European cities and had no connections to the major Islamist movements in the Arab world, except for the Saudis (48). The Algerian nationals surrounding bin Laden did not come from the Armed Islamic Group that had fought their government and military during the country’s civil war (1991–2002) but from immigrant and second-generation communities in Europe, and the few Palestinian militants in bin Laden’s organization were the children of 1948 refugees or had left Palestine in 1967. The Palestinian cause at home was about defending a (sacred) territory, not deploying “a generalized attack against Western imperialism,” as bin Laden intended to do. Roy concluded that “the recruitment, objectives, implantation, and individual trajectories of the second-generation militants” showed that “the al-Qaeda networks were not the products of Middle-Eastern conflicts but of the globalization of Islam,” although “they can obviously build upon these conflicts once again” (50). In his questioning of the dominant narratives of September 11, Roy also argued that the impact of the American reaction had been more limited than usually assumed and that the war on terror was less a new strategy than the reformulation of previous decisions regarding the Middle East or NATO: “September 11 ha[d] changed the global strategic balance only to the extent that it led the American hyperpower to redefine the threat and its future strategy” (18), while neither the Europeans, the Russians, nor the Chinese had concurred. The new American doctrine combined two distinct elements: the war on terror directed at non-state agents and the reformulation of Ronald Reagan’s description of the USSR as an “evil empire” in George W. Bush’s reference to the “axis of evil” in his 29 January 2002 message on the State of the Union, which listed the same rogue states as the Clinton administration had done. Roy agreed with Adler, but for different reasons (structural rather than ideological), regarding the supposed hegemonic nature of American foreign policy. Rather than as an argument for a critique of anti-Americanism, as in Adler’s case, Roy saw the

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absence of imperialist designs simply as a sign of weakness: “The war on terror as well as the denunciation of ‘the axis of evil’ do not in any way constitute an imperial doctrine aiming at reorganizing the world in a new order ... The new American doctrine is a patchwork of decisions already made before September 11, of ideological considerations, of contradictory interests, moralizing voluntarism, and ... impotence.” The real paradox revealed by September 11 was that the United States was “a skittish hyperpower, violently defensive, and without a global project other than very pious dreams and sermons that only convince the converts. We can’t escape the religious” (82). Despite their differences, Roy and Adler also agreed on one of the major consequences of 9/11, the disappearance of the Cold War concept of dissuasion, a result of the uncontested dominance and demonstrated vulnerability of the United States. By making any contention by other countries impossible, since “no State can challenge, as a State, American power, globalization destroys territorialization, and in doing so the very concept of strategic space. There is nothing left to negotiate in terms of territory, spheres of influence or vital interests with the losers of mondialisation. The very concept of dissuasion disappears, since the new terrorists have nothing to lose and do not have either any masters who have something to lose, only gods” (83).5 NIHILISM : THE DEGREE ZERO OF INTERPRETATION

As previously mentioned, while journalists and experts in international relations focused their attention on the military, geostrategic, and territorial dimensions of 9/11, several philosophers went down the interpretive road explicitly rejected by Roy, i.e., to rethink the event in moral and metaphysical terms as a manifestation of nihilistic evil. André Glucksmann had opened his own reflections on 9/11 with a question posed by a twenty-one-year-old employee working on the sixty-fifth floor of Tower B who had escaped from the towering inferno: “By the way, do you know who did that to us and why?” The remaining pages of Dostoïevski à Manhattan were meant to provide an answer to the young survivor’s inquiry, since “to identify and punish the criminal is only the first step. What remains is to understand the deliberate will that organized the event” (Glucksmann 2002, 12). For Glucksmann, the usual socio-economic explanations (poverty, illiteracy, unemployment) would not do, insufficient as they were to account for the “structured fighting spirit” of the perpetrators, young

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warriors from all classes and ideological persuasions, “planetary outlaws” who prided themselves on being uprooted.“Despite what crude or highly educated sociologists argue, the disadvantaged do not make it a habit to settle their scores by blowing up fancy neighborhoods ... To attribute to the ‘poor’ ... four thousand murders, at once and in cold blood, shows a rare kind of indecency, humiliation, and affront. The misery of the world and the decision to destroy the world are not the same” (33). The source of the destruction lay elsewhere, in “the furor that has animated, from the start, the human condition,” and the silent horror of September 11 would have been less intensely shocking if “a centuryold inhumanity had not come to the surface” (19). The reference to Dostoevsky in the book’s title pointed to the root cause of “the ecstatic intoxication of Islamist apocalypses,” i.e., the same nihilistic impulses Russian literature, to which a good portion of the book is devoted from Pushkin and Chekhov to Solzhenitsyn and Zinoviev, never ceased to ponder, following the rise of anarchist cells, the Czarist and later Stalinist states’ brutal response, and the cycle of repression and revolt that ensued. For Glucksmann, literature (Shakespeare and Flaubert eminently, in addition to the Russian novelists) held the key to the black box of wanton mass violence because unlike “historians, sociologists and philosophers ... who comment ad infinitum on what envelops the action, the writer ... inspects the action itself” and the havoc it secretly conspires to wreak upon humankind (134). Glucksmann could not resist subverting Marx’s famous words about the spectre of communism haunting Europe (in his 1845 Communist Manifesto) by claiming that today’s threat was of a different nature and no longer limited to the old continent: “A spectre haunts the planet, that of nihilism” (43), the will to absolute devastation combining sadistic violence and sexual enjoyment. Just as the murderous fury precedes the theories that later give it some legitimacy, cruelty comes before pleasure and produces its own jouissance: “When in the light of the immense deflagration of World War I, Freud, beyond Eros, uncovers an instinct of death and destruction non-reducible to the drive for life, totally autonomous, radically distinct, he recaptures Pushkin’s intuition of a night proud of its darkness” (128). Psychoanalysis meets Russian literature in the novelist’s fascination with the fact that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, shared her body and her bed with whoever accepted in advance to be executed at the break of day (128).

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Glucksmann’s argument displayed a tension between his historical genealogy of nihilism and the radical novelty of its manifestation in Manhattan. The exterminating angels have always been hoodlums, thugs, and mobsters driven by hubris and thriving outside the law to target urban populations, and their struggle against the citizenry (those who make up the democratic cité and live according to its rules) goes back, at least, to ancient Greece. The text listed several cities martyred by state terrorism in the previous century: Basque Guernica (Spain, 1936), Jewish Warsaw (Poland, 1943), Tutsi Kigali (Rwanda, 1994), Muslim Srebrenica (Bosnia, 1995), and Chechen Grozny (Russia, 1999). Echoing Negri’s “We Are All New Yorkers,” Glucksmann claimed that Manhattan stood out as the paradigmatic sign of what had changed forever, not because of the exceptional number of victims but because it was, unlike the devastated urban spaces of ethnic-religious genocide listed above, “the cosmopolitan city of cities” (46) whose murdered dwellers were not from one powerful nation or persecuted minority but included more than sixty nationalities. “The challenge confronting the modern city,” Glucksmann remarked, “is neither temporary nor specifically Islamist. She has to face the illimitation of violence specific to the war of the hoodlums signalled by September 11, 2001” (42). The new challenge called for a redefinition of our usual categories of space and time, the erasure of the difference between wartime and peacetime, and the advent of a violence deprived of moral, legal, or geographical borders as a result of the delocalization of the nihilistic threat. Cities figure prominently in the current ideological struggle between national-populists and globalists over whether immigrants and refugees are a planetary menace to the integrity and stability of the imagined community. In Shell Shocked, his comparative study of 9/11 with three other major attacks in western Europe (Madrid, London, and Paris), Gérôme Truc also remarked on the centrality of urban consciousness in the transnational solidarity generated by terroristic acts, since “metropolises ... are by nature places of social mixing, open to all, cosmopolitan ... So, it is possible to say ‘the Belgians are also Madrilenians,’ or ‘I am German, but I am also Madrilenian,’ whereas declaring that ‘the Belgians are also Spaniards’ or ‘I am German, but I am also Spanish’ would strike many people as a logical contradiction” (Truc 2018, 151). Truc referred to the long historiographical and sociological tradition devoted to the emergence of a tolerant, humanist ethos in large urban environments, citing works by Max Weber, Georg

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Simmel, Marc Bloch, and Claude Lefort who mentioned Machiavelli’s Florence as the cradle of civic humanism or Amsterdam as the symbol of the free commerce of ideas during the Enlightenment.6 “We could also add Berlin at the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth centuries,” Truc noted, “or the Vienna of Freud and Wittgenstein ... about which Stefan Zweig wrote: ‘It was sweet to live here, in this atmosphere of spiritual conciliation, and subconsciously every citizen became supernational, cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world’” (156). Wasn’t the southern tip of Manhattan the very place where Emma Lazarus’s “poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores” came to the New World in search of the American Dream? In the words of Jean-Paul Dollé, more than hatred of America, September 11 expressed hatred of world cities and more precisely “hatred of what they permit, that is to say sexual and thus social mixing, urbanity, civilization” (cited in Truc, 157). SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE AND THE METAPHYSICS OF EVIL

Epistemologist and philosopher of science Jean-Pierre Dupuy grounded his own answer to the question posed by André Glucksmann’s survivor from Tower B (“By the way, do you know who did that to us and why?”) in René Girard’s anthropological theory of the genesis and dynamics of collective violence. His own interest in ethics and the question of evil in Girard’s work went far back, as evidenced by the co-authored volume he had published with poet Michel Deguy two decades earlier, René Girard et le problème du Mal.7 Dupuy’s book on 9/11, Avions-nous oublié le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre (Had We Forgotten about Evil? Thinking about Politics after September 11), argued that the flaw in the commonly accepted explanations was the attempt to make sense of meaningless acts on the basis of the radical otherness of “crazy religious beliefs,” as if “religious beliefs could have enough strength to cause such acts!” The consequence of this mistaken, and circular, view was that “if there is horror or madness in some action, the entire feeling of abhorrence it inspires will focus on the beliefs and desires imputed to the act as its causes, while the act itself will be justified by these very causes transformed into reasons” (Dupuy 2002, 14). The target of Dupuy’s criticism was “the individualistic and rationalistic model that currently dominates the human sciences, and beyond, our common sense.” This

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model paradoxically attempted to “salvage the rationality of an act of tremendous violence and madness” by assigning to its perpetrators “beliefs (or in other cases desires) that any sensible person would reject with horror, ridicule, or commiseration” (13–14). Although Dupuy contested the pseudo-rationality of contemporary political thought, cognitive sciences, and analytical philosophies of language and mind, he did not share Glucksmann’s claim that terror would inevitably be justified, and therefore excused, by any attempt to find reasons for it. Today’s political philosophy, he argued, “is powerless to help us understand evil when it appears suddenly on a beautiful September morning out of a perfectly blue sky (‘out of the blue’) because it ignores the tragic nature of the human condition and is only peopled with ‘rational’ and ‘reasonable’ beings who really do not need anything in order to live decently together without slaughtering each other” (37–8). Criminal acts of great magnitude are not unthinkable and unexplainable but are the result of the enduring mechanisms of competitive rivalry René Girard described as mimetic desire: when human subjects yearn for the same object(s), violent conflicts inevitably arise. Girard himself had provided a chillingly prescient account of 9/11 in a book written before the event in which he argued that the key to mimetic rivalry did not rest in the logic of difference but rather in fascination, imitation, and resentment, and the passage is worth quoting at length. “The hatred of the West and of everything it represents,” he wrote in The One by Whom the Scandal Comes, “arises not because its spirit is really foreign to the peoples of the third world, nor because they are really opposed to the ‘progress’ that we embody, but because the competitive spirit is as familiar to them as it is to ourselves. Far from turning away from the West, they cannot prevent themselves from imitating it, from adopting its values without admitting it to themselves ... The rivalrous ideal that our example imposes on the whole planet cannot make us conquerors without there being uncountably many vanquished, uncountably many victims ... Above all, it creates a fervent determination to utterly shatter the enormous competitive machine that the United States, closely followed by all the other nations of the West, has become, a source of immense personal and national humiliation. People everywhere are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance” (Girard 2014, 8).

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In Dupuy’s view, Osama bin Laden himself had provided the most gruesome illustration of the truth of mimetic rivalry as the source of the resentment of an entire people excluded from social and economic progress. In a 1998 televised interview given two months before the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the leader of al-Qaeda proclaimed that after World War II “the Americans grew more unfair and more oppressive towards people in general and Muslims in particular ... The Americans started it, and retaliation and punishment should be carried out following the principle of reciprocity, especially when women and children are involved ... Your religion does not forbid you from committing such acts, so you have no right to object to any response or retaliation that reciprocates your own actions. But, and in spite of this, our retaliation is directed primarily against the soldiers only and against those standing by them. Our religion forbids us from killing innocent people such as women and children.” In the course of the interview, the leader of al-Qaeda referred to yet another precursor of 9/11, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (when the term “ground zero” was actually used for the first time by American authorities) and made a veiled allusion to what the United States would have to face in the near future in accordance with the principle of reciprocity. By appealing to mimetic violence, bin Laden thus conveniently justified ignoring the interdiction of killing women and children he had found in the Quran and ironically furthered Islam’s alignment with Christianity’s barbaric disregard for the innocent: “We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you except perhaps retaliation in kind. We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says.”8 Although bin Laden had revealed that the principle of reciprocity, the biblical lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”) was at the heart of his Holy War, he could not for obvious reasons admit that the vicious cycle of retaliatory violence came from what Maxime Rodinson, a noted specialist of Islam, called “a jealous ambivalence regarding the attraction of Western influence born of [Islam’s] common origin in biblical monotheism” (cited in Dupuy 2002, 44). In Le Figaro of 28 September 2001, Rodinson rejected Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis based on the radical alterity and absolute incompatibility of the Muslim and Christian world views. On the contrary, the

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French orientalist insisted on their proximity, Islam being “an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tree,” thereby confirming Tocqueville’s thesis that the cause of virulent conflicts is to be found in identity, not alterity (44) as well as Freud’s famous statement on “the narcissism of minor differences” in Civilization and Its Discontents. For the leader of al-Qaeda to acknowledge such an invidious rivalry between the scions of biblical monotheism would have diminished Islam and unwittingly confirmed the superiority of its enemies’ achievements. On the other hand, the thesis of an unconscious, frustrated wish to be better than the West could comfort the survivors of 9/11 and those who mourned the loss of the victims in the view that the accomplishments of Euro-American modernity, from tolerance to human rights to civil liberties, were the true, and highly legitimate, targets of the terrorists’ (self-)hatred. Like many French academics brought by professional or personal connections to New York City during or immediately after the tragedy, Dupuy, who taught philosophy at École polytechnique and Stanford University, found himself walking through the rubbles of Ground Zero three months later. The pages devoted to his emotional pilgrimage to the site of the atrocities also serve as a personal testimony to Girard’s accurate linking of violence with the sacred. The gripping description of the apocalyptic landscape caused by a modern Armageddon appeared again and again in numerous fictional and non-fictional texts by French residents, visitors, and witnesses. Dupuy’s book contributes to the filmic and literary archive of 9/11 by evoking the acrid smell of burned bodies in the still-smoking ruins, the procession of trucks ceaselessly hauling away “twisted metallic forms, the skeletons of imagined monstrous creatures, to mysterious recycling centres where one would know how to spot human remains amid the sheet metal,” and the inevitable reference to Hollywood cinema found in accounts by Žižek, Beigbeder, and Taillandier: “Huge projectors were lighting up the whole scene, making it look like a Steven Spielberg movie” (Dupuy 2002, 58). The French visitor cannot find a single word in his own language to suggest the overwhelming presence of the sacred on the site of Ground Zero, where skyscrapers formerly dwarfed by the now absent WTC towers stood guard, “covered with black tarps, like giants in mourning gathered around an enormous hole. Speaking and thinking in English, the only word that came to my mind to name what I was feeling then was awe. This term, which denotes an emotion

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involving the kind of terror, veneration, and wonder caused by the sacred or the sublime lacks a simple equivalent in French. My favorite translation is that of terreur sacrée [sacred terror]. Yes, the sacred was definitely present on the site” (59). Ironically, the bombing of Baghdad on 19 March 2003, a response to the destruction of the World Trade Center furthering the deadly cycle of retaliation, would later be described as “shock and awe” in reference to a military tactic based on the spectacular use of overwhelming military force to annihilate the enemy’s will to fight, a term associated with the effectiveness of the Roman legions and the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg of 1940. The evocation of Ground Zero led to some final remarks from Dupuy on the role of ritual sacrifices in the genealogy of primitive religion, although not with the usual cliché that terroristic violence is the remnant of ancient irrational beliefs, the same beliefs many analysts of the secularization process see as having almost disappeared from the public scene in postmodern societies. For Dupuy, the term “sacred” (which shares the same etymology as “sacrifice,” that which makes something sacred) evoked “the inhuman, or rather nonhuman, mechanical dimension of the violent genesis of the religious. The sacrifice is a ritual, i.e., a perfectly codified representation, a staging. What is re-presented in this way is the mechanism by which a crowd overtaken by a murderous frenzy assembles and unifies around a victim judged as responsible for all the woes that plague” the barbaric mob (44). Echoing Adler’s reference to the biblical site of Armaggedon, Dupuy noted that the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which the Muslims call al-Ḥaram ash-Sharīf, the third holiest site in Islam, is the sacred ground where Abraham is said to have been prevented by God from sacrificing his own son, Isaac, whom he replaced with a lamb. The Abrahamic story opened up “the history of symbolization” as the civilizing process whereby “a place-holder, a symbol, is substituted for the human victim, in the form first of an animal, then of plants, and later of abstract symbolic entities” (63). By way of conclusion, Dupuy traced the jihadists’ violence, and the universal awe it generated, all the way back to the sacrificial origin of human conflicts, the best-kept secret of cultural anthropology, one of these “things hidden since the foundation of the world” Girard repeatedly discussed in his writings. Manhattan, like the site of Abraham’s story, had now become hallowed ground because “the September 11 madmen have not performed a self-sacrifice, as the ideology of martyrdom complacently displayed by their sponsors and naively taken

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up by all those who indulge in ‘victim-centred resentment’ would have us believe. No, it is a real sacrifice in the anthropological sense of the word. If the terrorists have, by their hideous murder, rendered sacred the site of their crime, it is, as etymology tells us, because they have sacrificed innocent victims” (61). DECONSTRUCTING

“ TERRORISM ”

A number of major voices in critical theory also contributed to the post-9/11 debate, including Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou. These representatives of the 1960s philosophie du soupçon used interpretive protocols derived from Heideggerian deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Foucaultian biopolitics, and post-Marxism to question the use of ideologically inflected signifiers such as “terrorism” and “fanaticism,” explore the relationship between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary in the dominant visual and discursive representations of the event as collective trauma, or contrast American and European responses to “the politics of evil” and the construction of a national consensus to legitimize the war on terror. Although the post-structuralists sometime diverged in their analysis, they all agreed about the urgent need to subvert the official paradigms and dominant readings produced by the media, the political class, and many public intellectuals. At the start of his lengthy conversation on 9/11 with his colleague Giovanna Borradori, Jacques Derrida focused on what he called the unexamined “system of interpretation” hastily superimposed by the US authorities, the media, and many commentators on an event direly in need of intelligibility: “I am speaking here of the discourse that comes to be, in a pervasive and overwhelming hegemonic fashion, accredited in the world’s public space ... the axiomatic, logic, rhetoric, concepts, and evaluations that are supposed to allow us to comprehend and to explain precisely something like ‘September 11’” (Borradori 2005, 93). The combination of italics and scare quotes was meant to address the thorny question of both the meaning and the future of the event in the circumspect manner typical of Derrida’s deconstructive approach. In the course of the interview, he revisited some of the major tenets of his previous work, including the power and limits of conceptual thought, the nature of trauma and of the event, and the future of democracy defined as “what is to come” (à venir) in the field of the political, while repeatedly questioning the apparent semantic consen-

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sus behind essentialized signifiers such as “terrorist” or “Muslim” as if their referents were unambiguous and immediately transparent. In Derrida’s view, nothing manifested more clearly the inability to name the event found in most initial reactions as its dating, the shorthand, stylized combination of two numbers (in English) and a digit and a month (in French): “The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy – a name, a number – points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that ... we do not know what we are talking about” (86). Most reactions were reduced to repeat that date endlessly, mechanically, as “a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain,” not only as a sign of the powerlessness of language to properly name the event but also as an attempt to “conjure away, as if by magic, the ‘thing’ itself, the fear of the terror it inspires (for repetition always protects by neutralizing, deadening, distancing a traumatism, and this is true for the repetition of the televised images we will speak of later” (87). Linguistic performances could not be dissociated from psychological symptoms, since “‘terrorist’ acts try to produce psychic effects (conscious or unconscious) and symbolic or symptomatic reactions that might take numerous detours ... The quality and intensity of the emotions provoked ... is not always proportional to the number of victims or the amount of damage” (107). The tragedy undermined the very possibility of working through the traumatism because it not only destroyed lives and buildings but the system of interpretation itself, “the conceptual, semantic, and one could even say hermeneutic apparatus that might have allowed one to see coming, to comprehend, interpret, describe, speak of, and name ‘September 11’ – and in so doing to neutralize the traumatism and come to terms with it through a ‘work of mourning’” (93). The incantatory compulsion to repeat inevitably failed to resolve the trauma because it was not only about a past event and its psychic management in the present but because it also had to do with the Derridean prophetic trope of “what is to come.” The traumatic nature of September 11 rested in the fact that “the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past. The tragedy bore “the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place” (97). The very possibility of an absolute threat without limit rendered impossible the collective work of mourning that would “attenuate or neutralize the effect of the traumatism (to deny, repress, or forget it, to get over it” (99).

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At this point in the interview, the deconstructive approach based on linguistic and psychoanalytic considerations took an unexpected turn: although the future of the event remained unforeseeable, and therefore terrifying, it had been far from unpredictable, for a variety of historical and geopolitical reasons. To the extent that the event (in its Heideggerian sense) “is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension ... it calls for a movement of appropriation (comprehension, recognition, identification, description, determination, interpretation on the basis of a horizon of anticipation, knowledge, naming, and so on)” (90). Although the discourse that dominated the public space had failed to satisfactorily capture the meaning of 9/11, it had not been impossible “to foresee an attack on American soil by those called ‘terrorists’ (we will have to return to this word, which is so equivocal and politically charged)” in light of the planned destruction on the Twin Towers in 1993 and the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 (91). As a result of the predictability of the event, the philosopher was bound by a duty to join the ranks of the other explainers of 9/11, despite his previous rejection of “the lexicon of violence” present in most reactions to the catastrophe. At this point, Derrida readily admitted that the narrative of ignorance, incomprehension, and meaninglessness regarding the nature of 9/11 would not do and that “we must look for meaningful and qualitative explanations” (92) beyond remarks on the size of the towers or the number of victims. In response to a remark by Borradori regarding the risk of “total anarchy” as a result of the event, Derrida argued that “the word ‘anarchy’ risks making us abandon too quickly the analysis and interpretation of what indeed looks like pure chaos ... We must do everything possible to make this new ‘disorder’ as intelligible as possible” (110) by engaging in some analysis of “the operation with which the name ‘bin Laden’ is associated, as least by metonymy” (111). The required explanation needed to take into account several empirical factors outlined by other analysts at the time, including the unilateralism born out of the collapse of the USSR a decade earlier, the rise of “anonymous and nonstate organizations armed with virtually nuclear powers,” (110), “the aftermath of an era of colonialism or imperialism” based on “poverty, oppression, and ideologico-religious indoctrination,” the role of oil-rich Saudi Arabia in fuelling (so to speak) “all of the hotbeds of Arab Islamic fanaticism,” etc. Derrida added an original twist to this set of predictable reasons by referring to the devastating effects of the West’s self-imposed, perverse

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“autoimmunitary processes,” a notion borrowed from Roberto Esposito’s work on biopolitics and defined as “that strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (94). In the short essay on Deconstructing Terrorism that follows her dialogue with her French colleague, Giovanna Borradori commented that “in Derrida’s reading, 9/11 is the symptom of an autoimmune crisis occurring within the system that should have predicted it” in the form of “the spontaneous suicide of the very defensive mechanism supposed to protect the organism from external aggression” (150). In other words, the United States (and its Western allies) are said to have unwittingly created the very conditions of their own vulnerability to terroristic violence. Derrida distinguished three phases in the autoimmune crisis of which 9/11 was a symptom: 1) the Cold War, defined by the traumatic but controlled balance of terror between two nuclear superpowers, 2) the end of the Cold War, marked by the proliferation and availability of nuclear, bacteriological, and chemical weapons to other nations and non-state agents, and 3) “the vicious circle of repression” implied by a global war that “works to regenerate, in the short or long term, the causes of the evil it claims to eradicate” (100). The role of “the technoeconomic power of the media” was another symptom of the autoimmunitary perversion, since “the target (the United States and its allies) had in its own interest (the same interest it shares with its sworn enemies) to expose its vulnerability; to give the greatest possible coverage to the aggression against which it wishes to protect itself” (109). The effects of this extensive visual coverage of the exceptional, world-historical nature of the event gave rise to a number of sometimes diverging interpretations by critical theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou. THE ONTOLOGICAL AMBIGUIT Y OF 9/11

The very short time that elapsed between the first impact on the World Trade Center towers at 8:46 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time) and the first image shown on CNN almost immediately (8:49 a.m.) as a result of the speed of satellite transmissions meant that the viewing of the event was almost live, a striking development in terms of the timing between a traumatic event and its symbolic inscription within an individual or collective psychic economy. In the novel Windows on the World, Frédéric Beigbeder plays on this “live” quality of the reporting

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and incorporates its minute-by-minute unfolding in the very structure of the book, made up of short chapters, each corresponding to an instant in time, as the fictional account starts at 8:30 a.m. and ends at 10:29 that same morning. While the first temporal lapse occurred between the actual impact of the plane and its earliest visual representation, the second one separated the initial news break comments from the politically significant discursive articulation by George W. Bush’s chief of staff, who informed the president at 9:05 a.m. that “a second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.” While the first hit could have been an accident, the second one confirmed an intentional, i.e., politically meaningful, act. This short temporal gap was filled with what historian Carol Gluck has called the “raw images and information that filled the screens during the [early] special news breaks, when nobody really knew what had happened because there was not any ‘narrative’ yet, or any control of the facts” (Gluck 2003, 136). In La Violence du monde, Jean Baudrillard also focused on the instant preceding the symbolization of the first impact on the towers, its “wording,” its inscription in a web of signifying narrative structures.“Everything is in the first instant,” Baudrillard wrote, “if one gets rid of this moment of stupefaction, of admiration – immoral, no doubt, but where one finds condensed, through the immorality of the image, the stupefying intuition of the event – if one repudiates this very moment, one loses any chance of understanding. If the first thought is to say: this is horrendous, that is unacceptable, then all the intensity, all the impact of the event gets lost in political and moral considerations. All discourses take us irrevocably further from the event, and we will no longer be able to get close to it, not any more than to the Big Bang” (Baudrillard 2003b, 20). Baudrillard’s “first instant” did not refer to the moment in time when the tragedy actually happened, since it took some time to unfold, the first plane having struck at 8:46 a.m. and the second at 9:03,9 but rather to the instant when viewers first saw the live shot of the first plane hitting the first tower as if the “truth” of 9/11 occurred not in reality (what the New Yorkers and tourists who were there witnessed) but in the virtual space of the media. Which allowed the critical theorist to claim that “the image and the event are there first [while] usually, in our media world, the image takes the place of the event” (21). Contrary to what usually happens in our visually driven culture in which the imaginary serves as a refuge against the impact

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of any traumatic event, in the case of September 11 the image itself became the event, inseparable from what it shockingly signified. In Baudrillard’s reading, the “visibility of substitution” usually associated with the image did not apply, since the “fusion between the real and the fictional” meant that “there [was] no loss of reality” through the fiction of the image. The fascination was first and foremost for the image, to which was added the “chill of the real”: “Not only is it terrifying, but on top of it, it is real” (24). As previously discussed, a long list of what Baudrillard called “moral and political considerations” were called forward to answer the collective need to understand the unbelievable and assuage the anxieties it triggered. The “unimaginable, unrepresentable, pure event” soon disappeared under the sheer mass of its condemnations and justifications, covering the “silent efficiency we try of course to dilute in all the commentaries that are like its metastases” (23). The Bush administration immediately denied all responsibility for what had happened, framing it from the start in a moral and religious rather than geopolitical register. The patriotic “heroic narrative” (Gluck 2003) that ensued was based on the victimization of innocent individuals and, beyond, of the entire American people, as a result of a band of fanatics’ pathological hatred of democracy, freedom, and modernity. In response, al-Qaeda’s supporters lashed out against the neo-imperialism of the US and of their allies in Southwestern and Central Asia, mixing religious (military occupation of the holy sites of Islam), political (diplomatic and military support of Israel and of autocratic regimes in the Arab world), and economic arguments (America’s national interests require the control of energy resources in the region as a result of the competition with Europe and China, who also need access to oil reserves). Meanwhile, paranoid conspiracy theories started to emerge to denounce the secret hand of either Saddam Hussein or the CIA. Baudrillard was highly suspicious of any “historical-political explanation” that ended up erasing “the singularity of the event,” whether these accounts came up with a long list of often incompatible causes or whether they found no reason at all behind what was described as a senseless, purely nihilistic “acting out.” The only tenable position, therefore, would be to provide no explanation at all in order to preserve the pure hyperreal nature of what had occurred: “Terrorism has no meaning, no goal, and cannot be measured in terms of its real consequences, whether political or historical” (34). Baudrillard neverthe-

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less legitimized his own interpretive raison d’être, answering the demand for meaning he found so objectionable in others by producing his own reading based, as are many of his works, on the relationship between death and the logic of symbolic exchange and, more specifically in this case, on the raising of a symbolic challenge (défi symbolique) to the West. Since it was impossible for the hijackers to prevail against “the system” at the level of reality, what was required from their point of view was “to transfer the fight to the sphere of the symbolic, where the rule is one of challenge, reversion, and escalation (surenchère) so that death can only be answered by an equal or superior form of death, a challenge to the “system” by a gift to which it cannot respond if not by its own collapse and death. “The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself will commit suicide as an answer to the multiple challenge of death and suicide, since neither the system nor power can escape the symbolic obligation: that of responding in order not to lose face ... The tactic of the terrorist model is to bring on an excess of reality” (Baudrillard 2003b, 35). As a consequence, the paradoxical meaningless meaning of September 11 was intelligible but not explainable, at least not by a set of conventional “reasons.” Baudrillard’s own reading enabled him to steer clear of the theories grounded on political, psychological, or economic causes and of accounts like Glucksmann’s that refused to grant any excusable motive to a purely nihilistic destructive act. REAL , SYMBOLIC , IMAGINARY

Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of September 11 in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) was also built around the opposition between image and reality, in his own terminology “the traumatic Real” and “the illusory Sphere” or “the virtual digitized first world” and “the Third World desert of the Real.” The complexity of his approach comes from the fact that his own use of “real” or “reality” points to at least two distinct possible meanings: the Real (or “the Thing”) in the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) sense of what eludes all attempts at description, narration, and symbolization on the one hand and on the other, “our social reality,” which is the opposite since it refers to the taken-for-granted, linguistically mediated ordinary world in which we operate every day, the set of “symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality.” Žižek’s “desert of the Real,” a phrase borrowed from the cult

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movie The Matrix, resembled Baudrillard’s “excess of real” in that 9/11 was said to have escaped all viewpoints, remaining forever an unreachable Void beneath the multiplicity of ideological projections. Žižek’s reading was based on what he called “the passion of the Real,” a notion borrowed from Alain Badiou’s essay The Century: “Alain Badiou identified as the key feature of the 20th century ‘the passion of the Real/la passion du réel’: in contrast to the 19th century of the utopian or ‘scientific’ projects and ideals, plans about the future, the 20th century aimed at delivering the thing itself, at directly realizing the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the 20th century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality – the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality” (5–6). In the post-totalitarian world of the twenty-first century (the world in which 9/11 took place), the will to destroy false appearances to reach the hard kernel of the Real took a different form, since it was mediated by the technological manufacturing of virtual reality. The “awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe,” as Žižek put it, generates in late modern subjects the need to reassure themselves as to an experience of the world that is always already suspected of being unauthentic, spectral, “de-realized.” This paranoid fantasy was the theme of Hollywood films such as The Matrix and The Truman Show. The characters in those movies were eventually awakened to the “real reality” that stood behind the electronically manipulated “everyday reality” in which they lived in a state of pure deception, the desolate, bombed out, post-apocalyptic Chicago of The Matrix or the more prosaic, meaningless suburban existence of the anti-hero in The Truman Show. The behaviour of “the cutters” who lacerate their own skins in order to feel that they are still alive was for Žižek a perfect example of our desperate need for experiential validation in a social world increasingly dominated by electronic simulacra. “This phenomenon is directly correlated to the virtualization of our world,” he wrote, and “it represents a desperate strategy to get back to the real of the body ... Far from being suicidal, far from signaling a desire for self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a stronghold in reality, or (another aspect of the same phenomenon) to firmly ground our ego in our bodily reality, against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existing” (Žižek 2003, 43). In this context, it would be tempting to describe 9/11 as the ultimate return of the Real against the de-sensitivization induced by the

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culture of electronic media. Žižek, who shared with Baudrillard a fondness for paradoxical reversals, undermined this expected reading by engaging further with the interplay between image and reality, making any version of September 11 as a “catastrophe in the Real” even more problematic. September 11 was not so much the return of the Real as it was its representation as a set of special effects: “We can perceive the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of 20th century art’s ‘passion of the real’ – the ‘terrorists’ themselves did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it ... The authentic twentieth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate ‘effect,’ sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies” (Žižek 2002, 11, 12). This further complication called for a reversal of the usual reading of 9/11 as simply the revenge of reality over fantasy, a shock that shook the West out of its complacency: “One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse that we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which are not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen – and what happened on September 11 is that this screen fantasmatic apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality)” (16). Žižek also warned the reader against a view of 9/11 that would reduce its reality to the special effect of its representation as image, which is what the most radical conspiracy theories did by claiming that the destruction of the towers never took place but only existed as fake videos: “Of course, the point is not to play a pseudo-postmodern game of reducing the WTC collapse to just another media spectacle” (17).

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A BREAK IN THE SYMBOLIC ORDER ?

In keeping with the ontological indeterminacy associated with 9/11, one of the major issues raised by critical theorists was whether it had enacted a break in the symbolic order of meaning and history. In standard “post-structuralist” fashion, Jacques Rancière also described an event in the real as one that cannot be apprehended through existing modes of conceptual articulation, therefore producing a gap or a fault-line in the relationship between the real and its signification (Rancière 2009). The question then became: was 9/11 an occurrence that could not be put into words or the return of a symbol previously repressed? Unlike Baudrillard, and Žižek to some extent, Rancière’s analysis was not based on the dialectics of speech and vision or on the tension between the pre-linguistic perception of what is happening and its discursive elaboration but on the ideological construction of the event itself. “The decisive point to know whether there is a break [in the symbolic order] then becomes the reception of the event, the ability of those that were concerned with it, and of those who were in charge of voicing its signification (the US government and the media) to ensure its symbolic apprehension ... I don’t see any such thing in the event of September 11 ... The collapse of the towers and the horrific death of thousands of innocent people do not signal the breaking in of an event that cannot be symbolized” (113). In Rancière’s account, 9/11, far from being impossible to put into words, had been immediately given a clear and definite meaning by none other than the commander in chief, twelve hours after the first plane had hit the first tower. For George W. Bush, the air strikes were unequivocally aimed at American exceptionalism: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts ... America was targeted ... because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.” The act itself could only be described in ethical and metaphysical terms: “Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror ... Today, our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature. And we responded with the

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best of America – with the daring of our rescue workers, with the caring for strangers and neighbors who came to give blood and help in any way they could” (Bush 2001). Rancière had a point. The religious lexicon that would play such a key role in the reception of George W. Bush’s leadership style at home and abroad was prevalent from the start: “Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us, spoken through the ages in Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.’” Dan Balz and Bob Woodward reported a few months later in The Washington Post that the president had written in his diary before going to sleep that evening that “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today ... We think it’s Osama bin Laden” (Balz and Woordward 2002). In a strikingly concise formulation intended to pre-emptively put a stop to the anguished self-questioning expected to follow and to prefigure the future national work of mourning, September 11, 2001, had acquired a memorial genealogy in American history, and Evil been given a human face. As Rancière saw it, the presidential statement was meant to help the national community to “integrate the event within the [symbolic] framework through which it represents its relationship to itself, to others, and to the Other” (Rancière 2009, 115). There was therefore no solution of continuity between the American way of life as a set of institutions, values, and practices and the religious beliefs of the people who shared that very way of life. The national consensus that swept the country expressed an “immediate fit (adéquation) between the political constitution of a community and the physical and moral constitution of a population” (116). American exceptionalism was based on the correspondence between an Idea codified in the Constitution and the mores of the people who embodied that Idea. Consensus-building would provide an answer to the question that echoed throughout the media, a question aimed at the core of the (self)-identity of an entire imagined community: “Why do they hate us so much?” The president’s answer lay in the fusion of ethics and politics: they hate us because freedom is our way of life. By articulating a rationale for the violence from the point of view of the victims, George W. Bush pre-emptively delegitimized any other narrative advanced by al-Qaeda and its supporters and

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eliminated the need for any debate on the geopolitical background of the entire operation. Rancière’s reading of 9/11 fit in with the broader context of his political philosophy, based on the opposition between “politics” (being-together as dissensus) and “the police,” an organization of the collective based on consensus. “There are two major ways of symbolizing the community,” he wrote, “as the sum of its parts [or] as the division of its whole ... as actualization of a way of being together [or] as polemics regarding what we have in common” (117). While the consensual process of symbolization rested on ethical principles, dissensus implied a struggle over the common good codified in juridical and political categories. The ethical framing of 9/11 revealed the eclipse of politics, the gradual evolution of contemporary liberaldemocratic societies toward a notion of collective identity deprived of its constitutive polemical nature. THE POLITICS OF EVIL

Rancière avoided a simplistic form of anti-Americanism by pointing to the blindness (or bad faith) of foreign critics who ridiculed the moralistic naiveté of George W. Bush’s speeches and the patriotic narrative that would immediately unite a large part of the American public. After all, the absolutist rhetoric of good and evil had its own genealogy in Europe, starting with the second denunciation of the Nazi and Soviet crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. Unlike the initial postwar condemnation of authoritarian regimes based on the political difference between democracy and autocracy, the post-sixties antitotalitarian rhetoric rejected fascism and communism as the products of an evil power “exceeding all juridical and political measures. Ethics ha[d] become the thought of this infinite, unthinkable, and irreparable evil, opening up an irremediable break in history” (2009, 121). The American president’s notion of “infinite justice” as the adequate response to a demonic force unbound by any notion of rights,10 whether domestic or international, was not specific to the American context, since similar trends toward “the illimitation of the punishment” were also at work in Europe. In other words, George W. Bush’s evangelical rhetoric was the Judeo-Christian version of a new conception of rights to be found in other liberal-democratic societies in a post-Christian form, especially in France where the notion of the common Good was rooted in secular categories rather than religious

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ones. The emergence of these new discursive regimes regarding the rule of law prepared the ground for the reception of 9/11 as irreparable evil: “If there ever was a symbolic break, it had already taken place. Attempting to date it from September 11 can only be a way of eliminating any political reflection about the Western states’ practices in order to reinforce the scenario of the infinite war of civilization against terrorism, of Good against Evil” (122). 9/11 AS DISCURSIVE STRATEGY

Alain Badiou shared with Rancière a focus on the linguistic construction of 9/11 in both moral and consensual terms. “All in all,” Badiou argued, “the formula of the consensus is: ‘Terrorism versus democracy.’ For the overwhelming majority of our contemporaries, I mean here, in this exhausted ‘democratic’ country that is France, this formula provides the space for the political inscription of the mass murders in New York ... Terrorist from now on qualifies an action as a formal figure of Evil ... The Manichean struggle between Good and Evil in fact pits two forms of terrorism against one another, ‘a state terrorism directed at peasant villages and ancient cities of Central Asia’ and a non-state terrorism aimed at ‘Western’ buildings” (Badiou 2015, 54, 50). Following a very detailed semantic investigation of what he called “the nominations controlled by the powers-that-be and their propaganda” (48), Badiou claimed that at the end of its long ideological history, from nihilism in late nineteenth-century Russia to the struggle against Nazism during World War II, “terrorism” had been voided of any real political content, having become essentially a purely formal substantive referring to the form of an action. As an empty signifier, the term dispensed everyone from any “reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences” (50) and could be filled with all kinds of ideological contents via its qualifier, i.e., in the case of 9/11, the adjective “Islamic,” as in the nominal syntagma “Islamic terrorism.” The task of critical philosophy was therefore to “examine the effects of the nominal chain inferred by the passage from the adjective ‘terrorist,’ which formally qualifies some actions, to the substantive ‘terrorism.’ That is indeed the moment when the form insidiously turns into a substance. And when a subject effect (facing ‘terrorism’ is a ‘we’ who wants to take revenge), an alterity effect (this terrorism is the Other of civilization, ‘Islamist’ barbarity), and finally a periodization effect (we are starting the long ‘war against terrorism’) become possible” (52).

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The systematic use of quotation marks points to the symbolization of trauma as discursive strategy addressed in various ways by Baudrillard, Derrida, Žižek, and Rancière to undermine the way the official rhetorical framing of September 11 had ended up removing all political or economic intelligibility from the event. As Badiou put it, “in ‘Islamic terrorism’ the predicate ‘Islamist’ had no other function than to give an apparent content to the word ‘terrorism,’ which is in itself devoid of any content (political, in this case). This artificial historicization leaves what really happened (the crime in New York) unexamined by thought (impensé) ... At the end of the day, the accepted version of 9/11 is nothing but a shadow theatre, a smokescreen and window-dressing, history as an illusory trompe-l’œil” (60). The elusive play of being and its appearances suggested by Badiou’s metaphors of optical illusion, false perspective, and shadow puppetry echoed the dialectics of visibility and invisibility frequently used in many interpretations of September 11, if only because theories of perception are central to the validation of knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition, including the cognitive role afforded to the senses in debates between empiricists, skeptics, and rationalists. More recently, the notion of the spectral as a transitional form between reality and fantasy had been in favour among some critical theorists following the publication of Derrida’s influential Specters of Marx in 1993. It is not surprising, therefore, that Žižek would resort to visual spectrality to describe the ghostly nature of the “screen fantasmatic apparition” of the obsessively repeated images of 9/11 that kept haunting the viewers’ memories, while the anxiety born of virtual warfare conjured up in the collective imagination the silent threat of immaterial weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological substances invisible to the eye. As Žižek pointed out, what we did not see was more important than what we saw; within the shockingly visible lurked some uncanny, even more disturbing imperceptible dimension. “The same ‘derealization’ of the horror went on after the WTC bombings: while the number of 6,000 victims is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see – no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of the dying people” (Žižek 2002, 3). There was no video recording of what had happened within the towering inferno: the extreme hypervisibility of the destruction of the high-rises from the outside was only matched by the secret of what took place inside the burning buildings. In the absence of a visual account of the victims’ horrendous fate, only words could give form

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to the spectral, as novelists such as Frédéric Beigbeder and Fanny Taillandier would argue. Before moving to the specific political forms taken by the legacy of 9/11 in the following two decades, let us look at the way the contested visibility of the event played out in a series of narrative representations ranging from novelistic fiction to conspiracy theories.

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2 Seeing Is Disbelieving: The Contested Visibility of 9/11

As previously mentioned, in the opening segment of Dostoïevski à Manhattan, André Glucksmann tells the story of Matthew Cornelius, “twenty-one years old, my son’s age, working on the sixty-fifth floor of Tower B.” As the young man reaches Ground Zero, a firefighter rescues him from the scramble of terrified victims and “orders him, like all the survivors: ‘Run towards Broadway, run and mostly don’t look to your left!’ Matthew ran. But Matthew, like Lot’s wife, did look to the left. It was horrible. I will never be able to sleep without seeing the human remains in front of the buildings, hands, feet, a head ... Horrible ... I should have listened to the firefighters” (Glucksmann 2002, 12). In the words of François Lagarde, “to avert one’s gaze is a natural reflex, and the few French people who managed to escape the collapse of the towers bore witness to the fact that they too, they above all, had tried not to look” (Lagarde 2005, 92). One of the Naudet brothers, who were among the first witnesses of the tragedy and made a film about it, went through a similar experience: “Upon arriving at the tower, on my right, two people were burning, two screaming bodies. I instinctively moved the camera away. No one should see that. Even that look, I regret it.” Bruno Dellinger, a survivor who wrote a memoir of 9/11, concurred: “The burned victims who are going down do not give me the slightest idea of the horror that must be unleashed seventy floors above. Or is it that I don’t want to see? ... Why am I turning away from these burned people who are going down exposing their open wounds? In order not to know? I unconsciously block all these thoughts to save my energy. Stay focused, first get out, survive” (92). Lagarde extended the refusal to face the trauma to several of the authors he cited and beyond to a col-

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lective “we” including himself and his readers, all sharing the averted gaze of the survivors: “There is always something that we don’t want to see in September 11” (92). The images of the planes hitting the World Trade Center were played again and again to viewers glued in shocked disbelief to their television sets or personal computers. For several hours following the attacks, the obsessive broadcasting of the same few available shots taken by amateur filmmakers was only matched by the compulsive consumption of the same visual material by millions of people all over the globe. Slavoj Žižek described in psychoanalytical (Lacanian) terms the traumatic effects of the visual repetition of images: “And so, during the days that followed September 11, 2001, our gaze fascinated by these images of the planes striking the towers, we were forced to experience the compulsion to repeat and enjoyment (jouissance) beyond the pleasure principle. The same shots were shown ad nauseam, we wanted to see them incessantly, and the strange satisfaction they gave us was pure jouissance” (Žižek 2003, 45). 9/11 instantaneously became a local, a national, and a transnational event, but it soon became clear that the geographical distance between those three spaces of reception would make all the difference in the world, so to speak, in the way diversely located subjects attempted to make sense of the tragedy. Carol Gluck, a historian living in Manhattan and teaching at Columbia University, suggested that New Yorkers and the visitors who had witnessed the event and/or its aftermath “for real,” without technological mediation, shared the privilege of authenticity over the millions who had only seen it via the distancing prism of television images always-already caught up in the commentaries of professional broadcasters: “While I embark on an ethnographical essay on the media to analyze the construction of television narratives of the war on terrorism,” she wrote, “my reflection cannot but be affected by the fact that I reside in New York. What others only saw on screens, we lived in full force: we saw it with our very eyes, we breathed the noxious air, we felt that New York, and not America, had been attacked, New Yorkers and their mayor faced the crisis and not Americans and their president. The fact that so many commentaries following the attack did not make any distinction between New York and America was irritating, as if we were all transformed immediately into stupid flag-waving patriots. Thucydides wrote for Athens, he came to his city’s defense, and that’s what I did for mine” (Gluck 2003, 136).

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Although the collapse of the towers was probably one of the most videographed event ever recorded, its visibility became highly contested in the ensuing weeks. Unlike the screen presence of the planes hitting the buildings for several days on end, the subsequent war on terror was largely kept hidden from the readers and viewers of American media. The lesson of Vietnam had been that the broadcasting of combat footage, shots of burning villages, and images of body bags on military helicopters was largely responsible for the rise of the anti-war movement and the shift of public opinion against “the dirty war” in Indochina. The proper conduct of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq would later imply both government censorship and journalistic self-censorship as to how much visual information would be provided to the public. As speech took over image, the discursive framing of 9/11 replaced the haunting, eerily graphic footage of the smoking rubble of the towers and the ripped open wing of the Pentagon building, and the aftermath became selectively visible. According to Gluck, the Pentagon bought all the satellite pictures available on the market in order to erase all traces of what was going on in the air and on the ground. The “mainstream media” accepted, somewhat reluctantly, the government’s request that the second bin Laden videotape claiming responsibility for the bombings not be made public, officially for fear that it might contain coded messages for his followers. In Gluck’s words, “the war in Afghanistan had at the beginning no precise narrative structure; and, more importantly, no image was available: neither the typical Vietnam war scenes (helicopters landing on grassy areas, running soldiers, thick smoke from an explosion on the horizon), nor the high-tech images of Scud missiles and ‘smart bombs’ provided by the Pentagon during the Gulf War. It was a television war that the viewers could not ‘see’” (150). And this not only because of the strategic and political imperatives of secrecy but because of the kind of military campaign it was, a “dematerialized” war waged with night raids, invisible drone strikes from above, and covert operations with undercover elite troops on the ground. VISIBLE , INVISIBLE , SPECTRAL

This chapter examines a different set of responses to September 11 than the previous one, namely, fictional accounts such as Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2004) and Fanny Taillandier’s Par les écrans du monde (2018), as well as conspiracy theories that soon

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questioned the official versions of the event and continue to do so twenty years later. Critical theorists raised issues of representation that pertain as well to fictional narratives, even though they used different rhetorical and expository strategies. The contested ontological nature of the tragedy (did it really happen the way we saw it happen?) and the disputed epistemological status of its discursive constructions (did it happen the way we were shown and told that it happened?) attracted conspirationist and negationist views alongside generally accepted, less controversial accounts. Regardless of the validity of their claims and the outlandish nature of some of them, these narratives remain signifying practices. As such, they raise pertinent questions about the relationship between words and things, being and appearance, signs and their referents, and can be subjected to protocols of reading, interpretation, criticism, and formal analysis applicable to other texts, whether literary, filmic, or scholarly. And if there is no evidence of their veracity, then they belong in the same category as myths, legends, and social rumours and can be examined as such. The interplay between the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary soon became a dominant framework for interpreting the meanings of 9/11 and has understandably been quite attractive to fiction writers. One of the most cited of the French novels on 9/11, Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World, includes two distinct but intertwined narrative lines. On the one hand, we have the fictional eyewitness account of a middle-aged Texan who finds himself trapped with his two sons in the restaurant sitting on top of one of the World Trade Center towers. Woven into the description of the growing horror experienced by the characters detained in the collapsing buildings are the retrospective reflections of a narrator named Frédéric Beigbeder, who is having breakfast two years later with his daughter on top of the highest building in Paris, the Montparnasse tower. The paradoxical nature of the event as both unreal and hyperreal, indescribable and yet the object of countless visual or textual representations, is a leitmotiv of the book. In the first pages, the French narrator declares that “since September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it. It’s impossible to write about this subject, and yet impossible to write about anything else. Nothing else touches us ... This thing happened, and it is impossible to relate” (Beigbeder 2004, 8, 9). The American narrator, Carthew Yorston, states near the end of the book, which coincides with the end of his own life (he jumps out

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of the window of the 107th floor with his sons) that “I wanted to live in a virtual world; I’m dying in a real one” (248). The spectral takes the form of a sign written in French (Crédit Lyonnais) that has remained on the New York building where the narrator used to work long after the bank that employed him had left the premises, haunting the neighbourhood, as it were, with the narrator’s memories of his own life in America: “I’m evicted by my past. My past wants nothing to do with me. My past accompanies me through the revolving door” (236). Walking through the streets of New York two years after 9/11, Beigbeder’s fictional double sees his reflection in the tinted windows of glass towers, “a tall, stooped silhouette in a black coat, a heron with glasses walking in enormous strides. Fleeing the image, I walk faster, but it follows me like a bird of prey” (235). Unable to shake off the ghastly, uncanny presence of his doppelgänger, the narrator compares art to a “window on the world” and describes his own predilection for auto-fiction as an attempt not to reveal his presence, not to make himself visible, but on the contrary to melt away, as the Twin Towers did. “A novel is a two-way mirror,” he writes, “behind which I hide so I can see and not be seen” (236). Several temporal dimensions are present in the novel. While instantaneity marks the relationship between the event and its global broadcasting, its subsequent memorialization in written, visual, and monumental form requires the long term of historical time. The victims are said to continue to haunt lower Manhattan long after their deaths, making sure that they will never be forgotten, that the work of commemoration performed by the video archives of the tragedy and the presence-absence that is Ground Zero will go on forever. “I’m starting to see things differently,” Carthew Yorston says in anticipation of his own disappearance. “As if they’re not happening now, as if they’re already memories ... The world is so much more beautiful when you’re no longer really a part of it. I know that I’ll remember even when I no longer have a memory. Because, even after death, others will remember us” (265). The continued act of remembrance, whether by the living or the dead, in contrast with the fleeting quality of the event itself, reinforces the survivors’ duty to recollect traumatic episodes of great proportion, and one of them, the Shoah, haunts Beigbeder’s novel. The French narrator explicitly equates the two catastrophes, despite the staggering disproportion in the number of their victims, and quotes documentary filmmaker Claude Lanz-

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mann, author of the monumental filmic memorial Shoah (1985), as saying that “the Shoah is a mystery: September 11 is too ... The Windows on the World was a high-class gas chamber. The customers were gassed, burned and reduced to ash. To them, as to many others, we owe a duty of memory” (263, 274). Like Carol Gluck, Beigbeder mentions the erasure of the victims’ bodies in what he calls one of the greatest postwar campaigns of media disinformation ever conducted. “Don’t show the blood, I can’t bear to look at it. When a building collapses, feel free to repeat the footage endlessly. But whatever you do, don’t show what was inside: our bodies” (262). Making suffering invisible contributes to its demateralization, and the text echoes Žižek’s remarks on “the derealization of the horror” performed by the absence of any visual representations of the victims’ deaths. In the narrator’s words,“I think that if you hide your suffering, it disappears. And it’s true, in a sense: it is invisible, and therefore it does not exist, since we live in a world that worships what is visible, demonstrable, material. My suffering is not material; it is hidden. I am my own revisionist” (29). In contrast to the visual censorship performed by television coverage, the privilege of literature is to show what is hidden, to speak the unspeakable: “It may be impossible, but it is [fiction’s] raison d’être. Literature is a Mission: Impossible ... Nowadays, books must go where television does not” (295). Therefore, the only way of knowing what happened in the restaurant located on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, between 8:30 and 10:29 a.m., is to invent it. Fiction serves as the only substitute for the lack of imagination that lies at the core of people’s inability to believe that the towers could collapse. “‘Singular lack of imagination. Confidence in the supremacy of reality over fiction. It’s like being inside a chimney,’ says one of the firefighters in ... The Towering Inferno (released in 1974, the year the World Trade Center was inaugurated). The fact that they didn’t attempt an air rescue is probably because the cops had seen the movie in which police drop cables from a helicopter in an attempt to save people trapped by a fire on the top floor of a skyscraper. In the film, the chopper crashes onto the roof. At 9:14, the police probably didn’t want to imitate art” (144). The last sentence in the original French version actually reads: “The police probably didn’t want to lend any reason to fiction,” which makes the point more cogently. Fiction in this case refers to film via the allusion to the Towering Inferno, and Beigbeder repeats one of the most pervasive clichés on 9/11,

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namely, that the collapse of the towers recalled countless Hollywood disaster films. A perhaps more interesting point is that visual fiction (as opposed to literature) had a profound impact on the way the police and rescuers as witnesses chose to act in the wake of the catastrophe. The text quotes a non-fictional individual, a survivor from the 72nd floor named Mehdi Dagdarian, as having told the media: “I couldn’t stop thinking: it’s not real, it’s a film. It can’t be real” (271). Beigbeder suggests that the superimposition of fictional images over what was actually happening skewed the bystanders’ perception of what they were witnessing and possibly endangered their own lives. “The ‘killer cloud,’ a tornado of rubble, 100-foot steel girders like train tracks falling from the sky ... is an image lifted from disaster movies: we’ve seen the same scene in The Blob, Godzilla, Independence Day, Armageddon, in Die Hard 2 and in Deep Impact: that morning, reality contented itself with imitating special effects. Some bystanders didn’t run for cover, so convinced were they that they’d seen it all before” (266). The repeated reference to film in relation to the believability of 9/11 is reminiscent of comments on the cinematographic nature of American culture found in other French depictions of life in the United States, such as Jean Baudrillard’s remark that “it is not the least of America’s charm that even outside the movie theatres the whole country is cinematic ... The American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies” (Baudrillard 1988, 56). Beigbeder’s French narrator concurred: “In the United States, life is like a movie, since all movies are shot on location. All Americans are actors, and their houses, their cars, and their desires all seem artificial. Truth is reinvented every morning in America. It’s a country that has decided to look like something on celluloid (Beigbeder 2004, 21) ... In America, dreams come true not because Americans want their dreams to come true, but simply because they dream. Dream without thinking of the consequences” (210). Literature, as opposed to film, becomes the only medium in which the invisibility of suffering can actually stimulate the reader’s imagination, rather than stifle it, because the evocative power of the written word, as distinct from the seduction of the image, does not provide the crippling illusion of reality. “From here,” the authorial voice says in the last pages of the book, which depict the final agony of those characters trapped in the restaurant, “we can penetrate the unspeakable, the inexpressible. Please excuse our misuse of ellipsis. I have cut out the awful descriptions. I have not done so out of propriety, nor

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out of respect for the victims, because I believe that describing their slow agonies, their ordeal, is also a mark of respect. I cut them because, in my opinion, it is more appalling still to allow you to imagine what became of them” (272). The paradoxical celebration of the reader’s imagination as the most effective way to represent the real to those who did not experience it is a self-defeating acknowledgment of the failure of the written word, coupled with the deliberate censoring of possible descriptions of suffering in a work of fiction (literature, after all, cannot show everything). This provides another instance of one of the most widespread aspects of the 9/11 story, i.e., a deepseated and widely held suspicion among many that it never happened or at least not in the way the official version(s) would like the public to believe. SCREENING THE WORLD

Fanny Taillandier’s Par les écrans du monde (Through the Screens of the World) is the most recent fiction of 9/11 published in France (2018). The novel weaves together the stories of three main protagonists whose destinies collide on that fateful day: Lucy B. Johnson, a brilliant mathematician employed in the risk management division of a large multinational insurance company located in the World Trade Center, finds herself buried in the basement of one of the crumbling towers; her brother William, a US Air Force veteran, is in charge of security at Boston’s Logan Airport, from which one of the planes bound for Manhattan has taken off; and a fictionalized Mohamed Atta, one of the real-life hijackers identified as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston, the first plane to hit the towers. While Beigbeder’s book spans only the time of the attacks, Taillandier’s covers the entire day, from dawn to dusk. The title of the novel, Through the Screens of the World, echoes Windows on the World in that it underscores the role played by imaging technologies, once again setting the visual and the global in a close, reciprocal, and codependent interaction. In an interview published in the French cultural magazine Diakritic shortly after the publication of her book (Taillandier 2018b), Taillandier underscored the shocking power of the images and described her work as an attempt to “unfold the sidération, of which Baudrillard has said that no representation any longer held against it. I felt like making him both right and wrong.” She mentioned the political nature of a project aimed at ren-

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dering the complexity of what is often reduced, in her own words, to “a debilitating ideological partition based on a radical alterity – the terrorist as monster, the victim as the metonymy of a wounded civilization, etc.” Taillandier’s reference to Baudrillard underscores the hybrid nature of the book, which her interviewer described as an “essay-novel” in reference to the citations of other authors in the course of the narrative and the inclusion of a bibliography (called “documentation”) listing government reports, scholarly works, Wikipedia articles, and Google maps grouped in various topics, from urban and media studies to cultural history, anthropology, and critical theory, with a warning to the reader that “this text is a fiction that does not aim at historical accuracy” (Taillandier 2018a, 252). Tallandier shares with Beigbeder a belief in the privileged ability of literature to provide a kind of knowledge inaccessible to visual arts and technologies: “Narration unveils what the images do not allow: it rests on causal links, genealogies, setting up relations between the individual and the collective, between affects and value systems,” she says in the Diakritic interview (Tallandier 2018b). “The image cannot tell, it cannot explain – it can only construct meaning at the point where it represents. What is out of camera, out of the frame does not exist ... Literature, on the other hand, does not show, but names. Words remain the tool.” The motif of the (outer) limits of visual representation appears in the opening sentences of the novel (the first chapter is entitled hors-champ, offscreen) painting a bucolic scene in the early morning of September 11, 2001, somewhere in suburban Wisconsin, where an old man is calling his children to tell them he is about to die. “Because of a lack of film, we will not have a single look at this patch of well-mowed lawn sloping down from the window left open, to the lake. The scene will not be recorded anywhere” (Tallandier 2018a, 11), although the trace of its absence in the real is inscribed as a succession of written signs on the page. On her way to work that morning, the old man’s daughter, Lucy, “blond dreadlocks, expensive suit, tan leather bag on the shoulder,” is captured by video surveillance cameras in the underground mall of the World Trade Center, her silhouette moving in and out of the several screens that line up her path as she walks briskly to the entrance of the second tower. While the “ball of fire” about to hit will also be caught on camera by media helicopters, together with the dark smoke billowing out of the building, Lucy’s image would still be visible, if anyone cared to look, for a short time, but after the first impact, she

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has started to run with hundreds of others, now eluding the gaze of TV screens, and the terrified young woman is soon out of range of telecommunications. “We are September 11, 2001, and we have learned for a long time to consider images as the facets of a coherent world. Offscreen, Lucy is running. Her leather bag held tight against her, her feet in her luxury boots, she is throwing her body forward with all her strength” (21). The title of the novel refers to what the author calls in the Diakritic interview the unceasing compilation of computerized data across the world, “the permanent recording of the real that ends up duplicating it instantaneously in the form of millions of disarticulated pixels.” Screens are indeed omnipresent in the narrative, not only as video surveillance systems in malls and airport halls but in movie theatres and libraries, via cellphones and home computers connected to a vast network of Foucauldian panopticons in the service of police officers, security agents, government leaders, military chiefs of staff, intelligence services, journalists, and terrorists. A telling passage in the novel explores the tension between the profoundly destructive effect of modern broadcast technologies on traditional cultures and societies and their use by jihadist leaders to recruit supporters and volunteers to their cause. The Talibans are shown destroying countless television sets, symbols of the corruption of modernity, piling up confiscated TVs as so many towers in the countryside, while bin Laden hires highly educated technicians to spread his videotaped messages across the globe. In the words of the Mujahedeens’ advice to their new recruits, “not one TV, let’s be clear, not one single goddamned TV must remain behind us. Our enterprise of divine purification would not survive this ... Just like radios, but worse, as attested by the sacred texts of the most holy laws validated by the Prophet, peace be with him, TVs are the devil’s gate to the minds, to the senses, and the homes ... Not far from the camp, deep in the valley, we pile up, panting, these TV sets on top of one another with the help of one of our brothers, for these instruments of the devil weigh as much as a dead donkey, for sure. One on top of the other the TVs form irregular columns, broken columns, whose blind screens refract, orange, the evening sun” (184, 186). “You might wonder, novice, why we need to film the fearless Osama bin Laden although we have destroyed all the TVs from the Hindu Kush to Balochistan ... You are now responsible for framing

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the moving image of the fearless cheikh that will be broadcast on the TVs of the infidels throughout the world to carry God’s warning to the hypocrites and the disobedients” (204). Screens operate in a paradoxical way: they provide access to a virtual reality of images, sounds, and texts, but they also substitute that reality for the material one we experience through our senses, thereby threatening to remove us, to screen us, from that other world mediated through our bodies. Hence the jeremiads frequently heard today about how one never talks any longer to a human being when calling a large company on the phone or how younger generations have lost the ability to conduct face-to-face communications with their parents or their friends, etc. The multiple meanings of to screen underscore the dual function of the electronic windows on the world that surround us, from viewing (a movie) to masking/protecting/shielding /sheltering (an object) to testing (patients), selecting (applicants), and ignoring or erasing (phone calls). Given the ubiquity of the surveillance regimes at war in the world, it becomes strategic for Taillandier’s characters to escape the control of the devices that manufacture and manipulate visibility and to elude the gaze of those who benefit from them in the pursuit of their sinister projects. At the end of the novel, Lucy’s brother William, a former military intelligence officer described earlier as “an interpreter of images” (61), is beset by serious doubts about the validity of the official version of what happened during the day and refuses to appear on television to comment on what went on at Logan Airport: — They sent a fax where everything is written about what I should say, but I don’t want to say it. I will not say it. — Why not? — Listen, Sally, it’s already hell, and now I’m supposed to launch the media circus, they are all going to show up in what, fortyfive minutes, all the journos of the East Coast. There is no way they are going to film me, goddammit! Specially to tell them a bunch of Bull. Have me on film! Sally puts her hand on William’s. — Calm down, calm down. Why is it bullshit? You read the text they faxed you? William has a short laugh, a bit hoarse, which surprises him. — Sally, come on. Too many coincidences (215).1

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William goes on to list all the reasons for his deep distrust of the fax he has received: “One, suspected Saudis in all the planes, while they are our military allies, conveniently. Two, all the detection systems remaining silent and letting twenty highjackers on four flights go through: you’ll admit that at this level, it is not even a technical failure, it is organized ineptitude; three, right smack when Congress is returning, as you reminded me yourself yesterday; four, the air space defense center takes so long to send the fighter jets that the planes have already crashed before they even took off ... I know that air defense and security are more performing that that. Too many bugs for one single event, let me tell you ... Too many coincidences. There’s another version of the facts, Sally, I’m sure” (215–16). William Johnson’s refusal to be caught on camera is an attempt to remain both offscreen and off the record because what exceeds the frame does not exist, as Taillandier herself claimed in the Diacritik interview. After his decision to go back to civilian life, William had obtained from the physician, before his discharge, “a medical file as new as if he had never been born,” hiding the fact that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, in an effort to fly under the radar, so to speak, to escape detection from potential employers. “[He] said nothing when his superior asked him why he was leaving [the military], nothing when his friends organized a little party for him in the air base mess, with a guirland of golden letters that said SO LONG MAJOR JOHNSON tacked on the wall. When things are left unsaid, they don’t exist” (148). THE ILLUSION OF THE ALL- VISIBLE

Like Beigbeder’s narrators and conspiracy theorists, William confronts the possible lie of the visible: “He has the unpleasant feeling of having been thrown into one of these movies where machines have gotten it into their heads to destroy people ... Not that anything throws into question, at this stage, the authenticity of these images; but in the country that has invented planes, skyscrapers and the cinema, it is unthinkable that this film, precisely this film, might not be a fiction” (2018a, 82, my emphasis). The three modalities of signification

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consisting of image, speech, and writing, from the semiotically simplest to the most complex, are similarly undermined at various moments in the story. In many instances, the real (or the truth) will not manifest as being; there is nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to hear, nothing to know or learn. The ontological uncertainty of 9/11 breaks through in metaphors of emptiness, ruin, silence, darkness, and loss of identity, as when Mohamed Atta visits the Great Pyramid of Kheops as a child, hoping to find traces of a bygone civilization: “They have entered a very narrow corridor, his father leading the way. The child expected a labyrinth, in truth one could not see anything ... He had hoped, in the frigid darkness of the funeral chamber whose enigmatic design he had so often contemplated, to discover at least a forgotten amulet, a sumptuary mask, a tiny little piece of leathery skin. Nothing” (40). The empty city of the dead in the Egyptian desert echoes the underground labyrinth where Lucy finds herself trapped under the collapsed WTC2 where “her screaming gets lost in the darkness” (80), as well as the ghostly urban landscape of her hometown, Detroit, after the downfall of its now mythical automobile industry. As for Manhattan after the catastrophe, it appears to Lucy, just rescued from her tomb, as “misty” and beyond recognition in the beautiful sunset, “an improbable field of ruins, perhaps the remains of an unknown civilization. In the smoke, everywhere, the blue rays of the flashing lights sketch moving hieroglyphs” (246), while two hundred miles away, the abandoned runways of Logan Airport “unfold their hieroglyphic paintings to the horizon” (56). Meanwhile, like a colonial archeologist reinventing an ancient culture out of “stones devoid of history,” the special agent tasked with reconstructing Mohamed Atta’s past out of fragmentary evidence (photos, reports, personal data, etc.) has failed to produce a stable version of the hijacker’s biography. Atta’s identity proves to be as elusive as the desert towns where he grew up and later trained as a jihadist, from Gizeh to Kandahar. In these places, where “the landscape is reduced to its most empty expression – rocky soil, wind, fog – Atta strips off his self, the remains of what he used to be, all the previous versions of himself as heights to be destroyed” (171). He is as enigmatic as the Sphinx of Gizeh, the suburbs of Cairo where he was born in 1968. Later, while an architecture student in Germany, he changed his image and his identity, calling himself Amir instead of Mohamed in order to pass for a Turk rather than an Egyptian. He collects false

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names and fake passports yet is able to leave the United States three times, “always under his real name” (212), and to return without any problem. He finally becomes invisible, as the security cameras at Logan fail to identify in this anonymous Monsieur-tout-le-monde (Mister Nobody), a dark-haired man with a sport bag and a blue shirt, the future kamikaze of AA Flight 11, whom posterity would forever remember as either as a psychotic killer or a hero, a martyr or a fanatic. “He strictly does not have any distinctive feature, none. It’s anybody and yet he is the one who, once in the plane, takes the controls and says If everybody stays calm it’ll be OK; he’s the one who positions himself facing the towers, and he’s the one who makes this incomprehensible decision: to go straight on, full speed ahead” (138). The other two protagonists experience a similar process of disidentification. In the underground void that keeps Lucy buried as in a vault, “it is as though, in this collapse, the multiple facts that, lined up one after the other, had sketched her life until now – hers and no one else’s – had been reduced to debris beyond recognition.” All that remains of her are “two panic-stricken eyes probing the darkness, and a scream. Nothing to articulate who she is, Lucy Bankowska Johnson, with her insignificant biography in the eyes of the world” (78). Baptized as Lucy rather than Lucja by her father, a Polish “migrant who has forgotten his name,” she is given anybody’s name, and even the addition of her unknown mother’s patronym during her teenage years fails to rescue her from her anonymity: “That other name [her mother’s] was both characteristic and all the more anonymous that it did not belong to anyone; it responded to Johnson like a dialogue between two non-echoing languages, two stories cancelling each other. This double surname, multiplying her roots: those of a disappeared country and an extinct family, coupled with such banality that all meaning was negated – Johnson, son of John – repeated the genealogical void” (135). William, for his part, manages to avoid the press conference he refused to attend by having his wife, Sally, falsely assume his identity and impersonate him in front of the media, and the two later decide to leave the city, undetected, in a police car and go to visit his father in the Wisconsin house by the lake. “He feels as if he is at the heart of a conspiracy, finally disappearing: he knows exactly the thrill of excitement Hakim Bey talked about and that had irritated him so much in the past, to escape general cartography, and to finally disappear” (245).

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The references to Hakim Bey and cartography point to a major theme in the novel, the intersection of geopolitics, global terrorist networks, and the visual representation of space. Hakim Bey, aka Peter Lamborn Wilson, is a (real-life) American poet and anarchist frequently quoted by Taillandier in the course of the novel and whose book, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991), is listed in the bibliography provided at the end of the novel. Lucy learns about Bey’s strategies to elude formal structures of visual control from her French boyfriend, Frédéric, the founder and manager of Télétopia, a “free TV station” whose goal is to combat all forms of oppression. Frédéric’s fictional interview with Bey centres on the inability of electronic visual mapping to insure complete control of individuals moving across space. “Today, satellites allow a total cartography, including ocean floors,” Bey explains. “The map tells us: I can see you wherever you are. The map provides, for power and its subjects, the illusion of absolute control ... The cartography of those in power sends us a single message: there is no hidden space. In fact, it is really easy to disappear. And I believe that it is in disappearing that we are vectors of insurrectional force ... This illusion of the all-visible is everywhere, all the time. And because we want to see everything, we are willing to be seen. That’s why we accept a political relation of absolute surveillance” (58–59, 61). William Johnson experiences firsthand the illusion of absolute control when the Logan Airport radars fail to keep track of flights AA 11 and UA 175. “He stops and motions one of the two other men, who turns around toward the big recording device next to the radar screen. He starts the reading. A nasal voice says: Nobody moves. If everyone stays calm it will be OK. The faces are livid; William understands that since morning they have been replaying the same sequence in a loop, that voice from the grave that can only be one of the hijackers. Then the flight has disappeared from the radar, they probably unplugged the connection ... William thinks, If everyone stays calm it will be OK. He gets up and moves closer to the black screens, letting his gaze wander on the deserted tarmac, then farther, across the empty sky, before leaning his head toward the map, blank except for the two broken black loops that end up meeting over the Manhattan peninsula. Incredible the way what is supposed to represent the world looks like nothing” (58–60).

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A small picture of the interrupted flight routes is inserted on the page as a visual aide, as other illustrations elsewhere in the book, including the photocopied, underlined, and annotated maps of Cairo documenting the disappearance of the old city erased by modern urban development that architecture student Mohamed Atta kept in folders later found by investigators and added to his posthumous file (70, 72). The failure of technology to properly capture the image of the protagonists allows them to elude the global panopticon and to engage at different levels in Bey’s insurrectional resistance against the “illusion of the all-visible.” At the end of the novel, everyone disappears in one way or another. William and Sally vanish undetected from Logan Airport in a stolen police car, leaving behind the TV cameras he never allowed to record his face or his words in a press conference. Mohammed Atta, who had repeatedly broken free from airport surveillance videos during his many trips across the Atlantic, meets an invisible and anonymous death, buried forever in the endless repetition of the televised images of his last action on earth, seared forever in collective memory. On the stretcher where the rescuers have laid her down, wounded but still alive, Lucy finally closes her eyes, perhaps returning to the vision she had before the voices of first responders woke her up from her dream about her childhood home, her father, and the screen of his television set: “The sun reaches the surface of the water, over there, toward deserted Detroit, a huge red and purple ball in fusion. It’s a beautiful sunset, Lucy thinks. A few belated sunrays dart long trails of fluorescent pink at the sky. Just like in her childhood fantasies, she rises and rises ... She is going to enter the house and, next to her father, turn off the television set” (246). THE BIG LIES

Many of the fictional and non-fictional accounts of 9/11 in literature and critical theory have addressed the elusive nature of the event, the unreliability of postmodern regimes of truth, and the explosion of fake news associated with the rise of social media. Like the fictional character William Johnson (and his creator, Fanny Taillandier), tens of thousands of people have shared reservations about or outright denials of the official story briefly articulated by the American president on the evening of September 11 or detailed in the 600-page report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the

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United States published three years later. 9/11 gave rise to a combination of ideologically motivated refusals to blame the perpetrators and/or doubts arising from the various ways in which the public authorities exerted a tight control on the media coverage of the tragedy. Within six hours of the collapse of the Twin Towers, a discussion in an Internet chat room suggested that it looked like a deliberate act of controlled demolition (Summers and Swan 2011). One week later, Le Monde mentioned the existence of individuals and groups who viewed it as the result of an “inside job” from within the US government. Interestingly enough, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Le Monde was to regret the spread of unofficial or counterofficial versions of the event. Among the factors explaining the proliferation of unsubstantiated rumours were the need to reduce anxiety, the excessive coverage of unfounded theories by the media in an effort to disprove them, and the widely shared success of “cognitive relativism” among intellectuals and the educated elites, who, ironically, made up most of the newspapers’ readership.2 The notion of conspiracy theory itself is polysemic and serves in different contexts to perform various ideological functions. As in the case of Le Monde’s article, the word is often used negatively to discredit views that seem impossible to document in a convincing manner. Conspirationists are described as either deluded, dishonest, or both and their assertions as reflecting a combination of ignorance, bad faith, resentment, and propagandistic motives. They are viewed as individuals prone to react to situations that affect them adversely by giving in to denial, wishful thinking, or even self-fulfilling prophecy. But not all suspicions, rumours, or beliefs in secret plots are a figment of the imagination, an exercise in bad faith, or an attempt to manipulate the public. Some of them eventually prove to be true. To stay within the context of post-9/11 developments, the denial that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction seemed at first a wild allegation motivated by agendas ranging from pacifism and anti-imperialism to a desire to spare the regime a likely military defeat. Most people would agree today that there were no weapons of mass destruction on Iraqi soil on the eve of the war and that the regime had maintained the fiction of their existence as a deterrent against its enemies, both inside and outside the country. Conspiratorial allegations can be viewed either as phantasmatic imaginings that will never be proven or as reasonable suspicions that defy conventional wisdom and deserve further investigation, and I am less interested in the validity of these claims

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than in what they reveal about our increasing inability to agree on the technologically mediated “reality” we all live in. Ever since Richard Hofstadter wrote his seminal essay on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” inspired by the McCarthy era, the growing interest in conspiracist writing has led to the emergence of a new academic subfield including dozens of publications. In the past two decades, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and political scientists have been debating the nature, genealogy, and cultural underpinnings of discourses and practices going as far back as antiquity. The epistemological status of these narratives remains in question, and there is plenty of disagreement as to whether they should be called theories or myths or ideologies, whether their volume has increased or decreased with the advent of modernity, whether some are more plausible or more problematic than others, whether they constitute a legitimate or illegitimate form of knowledge, and whether some of them have exposed real secret machinations or should be readily dismissed as unwarranted suspicions. Michael Butter, whose book Plots, Designs, and Schemes: American Conspiracy Theories from the Puritans to the Present has provided a detailed and comprehensive account of the current state of the field, challenged the growing skepticism on the part of those who have rejected conspiracism outright, casting it as pathology or propaganda. For Butter, “conspiracy theories deserve attention, not because they are dangerous, but because they often point to real grievances and flaws in the political order” (Butter 2014, 3). The cultural work they perform includes the forging of identities, the formation of counterpublics, and the articulation of genuine conflicts and anxieties, and as such they are deserving of “highly nuanced symptomatic readings” (4). In support of his thesis, Butter remarked that even Hofstadter, whose piece contributed to the pathologization of conspiracy theorizing, acknowledged that it was, “if not wholly rational, at least intensely rationalistic” (13). In the context of 9/11, Olivier Roy has underscored the “hyperrationality” of some of these views, citing the example of the American accommodating toleration of Sunni fundamentalism based on a belief that the real threat came from Iran. “This American indifference to [Sunni] Islamism has been overinterpreted in Europe, and even sometimes described as ‘a plot against Europe,’” Roy remarked. “We are faced here with the French tendency to indulge in hyperrationalization: since the United States is the greatest power in the world, it necessarily has ‘a grand strategy,’ all the more

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perverse and subtle as its rationality is not immediately perceptible. These conspiracy theories, always disproved by the facts (or by simple thinking), and based on an ignorance of Islamism as well as of the political decision-process in the United States, have been aggravated, as we know, by the attacks of September 11 and the publication of a book denying the reality of the air strike against the Pentagon” (Roy 2002, 68). As a form of “coded social critique,” conspiracy theories partake of the growing crisis of representation, in both the political and the semiotic senses of the word, that defines our current moment (Miller 2002, 51). As Butter puts it, conspiracists view their opponents as producing misleading signs and their own mission as to “establish a transparent order of signification” (Butter 2014, 18) and a restoration of the truth, relativists and deconstructionists be damned. Allegations about 9/11 include governmental ploys such as the planned collapse of the Twin Towers, the damage to the Pentagon building, and the fact that Jews had been warned in advance not to go to the World Trade Center on the day of the strikes. They also involve wide-ranging, interconnected plots leading to global threats such as the machinations of the New World Order or the Zionist Occupation Government. Some accounts merge previously isolated and time-tested scenarios, such as the actions of the secret society of the Illuminati, which goes back to the late eighteenth century but is believed by many to have survived to this day. The popular radio personality and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for example, has linked the Kennedy assassination, the election of Obama, and September 11 to the New World Order. A given stratagem can be limited in scope or quite complex depending on the number of individuals and institutions involved: it makes a difference whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or with a few accomplices in John F. Kennedy’s assassination or was actually a pawn in a coup d’état carried out by the military, intelligence agencies, and anticommunist members of Congress. While conspiracies in the past seem to have primarily focused on nefarious acts directed at institutions such as churches and governments, the prevalent type after 1960 has targeted plots by the rulers themselves against their own people or some specific community. The change in emphasis from outside conspirators to scheming insiders reflects what Peter Knight has called “a certain kind of world-weary paranoia [that] has become the norm” (Knight 2000, 2) and that is likely to be caused by the concomitant rise of the culture of secrecy

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within power structures and the widespread influence of social media among ordinary citizens. As a matter of fact, these theories are used not only by the disenfranchised and the oppressed; those in power use them as well when it serves their own interests, especially in autocratic regimes where protocols of fact-finding upheld by the judiciary, the legislature, or a free press have been greatly weakened. The allegations regarding the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the existence of close links between the Hussein regime and alQaeda can be viewed as examples of state conspiracy theorizing, since none of these claims were ever proven to be true. Cultural critics have linked conspiracism with populism as an expression of social conflict and struggle for ideological hegemony subject to semiotic processes of rearticulation, simplification, deflection, and distortion. Fredric Jameson has called conspiracies “the poor person’s mapping in the postmodern age” (cited in Butter 2014, 356), while Mark Fenster argued in his Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture that these narratives “simplify” the political space, “replacing,” as Ernesto Laclau says of populist rhetoric, “a complex set of differences and determinations by a stark dichotomy whose two poles are necessarily imprecise” (Laclau 2018, 18). As a result, the logical connections among discrete elements are replaced by “formal principles external to their logical nature” (Laclau 1979, 9). This insistence on the formal, rather than logical, properties of this type of theorizing has led many analysts to construct narrative typologies and to identify semiotic structures, figures, and tropes likely to be found in texts aimed at transforming a chaotic, unmediated reality into a transparent, stable, and unquestionable account of what “actually” happened. Fenster, for example, uses the notion of narrative pivot, a turning point in the story where “the protagonist gleans the single piece of information that enables him to realize the real nature that opposes him” (Fenster 2008, 135), which allows him “to connect the dots,” as Butter puts it. Fenster’s concept of restoration of agency refers to the fact “that the publication of a factual account about a conspiracy constitutes a first step toward defeating it, as more people will become aware of it now” (Butter 2014, 24). Some of these rhetorical strategies are exemplified in one of the earliest and most notorious conspirational account of 9/11 published in France, Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable imposture, literally “The Horrifying Deception,” translated into English as 9/11: The Big Lie. The French edition is reported to have sold more than 160,000 copies in 2002

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alone. Meyssan maintained that a missile, not a plane, had hit the Pentagon, a thesis largely based on the absence of any visible remnants of a large air carrier in the first pictures taken after the crash. The issue of questionable visual evidence is characteristic of the major role played in 9/11 controversies by photos, films, and videotapes, given the growing capacity of new electronic technologies to alter and replicate the physical world. The book was subsequently translated into more than twenty languages, and a sequel, Le Pentagate (Meyssan 2002c), soon followed. As a best-selling author, Meyssan faced intense public scrutiny and quickly attracted growing opposition, even from some of his close collaborators. Critics questioned the validity of his assertions and denounced his support of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Khadafi and Assad regimes as well as the presence of Holocaust deniers among his close allies. As a journalist and political activist with a checkered past and a complex ideological trajectory, he had been a controversial figure for some time before the publication of his books, and remained so in the following years. Born in a prominent conservative family in Bordeaux (his grandfather, a colonel, was a military observer at the United Nations and his father an influential local politician), Meyssan studied theology in the 1970s and was involved with the Catholic charismatic movement. A few years later, he joined a gay rights association and turned against the Church, denouncing corruption in the Vatican and the politics of the traditionalist organization Opus Dei. In the midnineties, he became national secretary of the Parti Radical de gauche (a centre-left party, despite its name) and a member of Réseau Voltaire, a think-tank supporting the cause of secularism and laïcité that was disbanded in 2007 before being resurrected by Meyssan himself as The International Voltaire Network, an anti-imperialist media outlet. In 2006, he joined some figures of the French extreme right as part of an international mission to Lebanon and subsequently left France, settling in Beyrouth and later Damascus, and five years later claimed that US agents had tried to kill him while he was in Tripoli reporting on the war in Libya. An active supporter of Shia Islam, he is regularly featured in the Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese media and is a frequent target of anti-conspirationist critics. Although Meyssan’s book focused primarily on the attack on the Pentagon and did not address the collapse of the Twin Towers at any length, the argument laid the foundation of what would become key elements of the narratives and counternarratives of September 11: the puzzling fact that the North American Aerospace Defense Command

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and the US Air Force were unable to intercept the hijacked planes; the presence in the Bush administration of politicians and advisers closely connected to oil business interests, making the invasion of Afghanistan, and later of Iraq, a classic case of a neo-colonial attempt to control oil production, from the Caspian Sea to the Red Sea; and the publication in the years preceding 9/11 of position papers and memos from influential figures in the American president’s neoconservative entourage advocating the reformulation of US foreign policy after the Cold War, especially in relation to what would soon be known as the “Greater Middle East,” the “arc of crisis” stretching from Mauritania to Pakistan. THE RHETORIC OF SUSPICION

Meyssan’s book was reviewed, advertised, and legitimized as a carefully documented “challenge to the entire official version of the Sept. 11 attacks,” according to a quote from the New York Times printed on the front cover of the English-language edition. The back cover described the author as “an attentive observer of international affairs” who, far from having rejected the accepted version from the start, had been “intrigued by the anomalies in the first photographs released of the attack on the Pentagon, and then by the confusion and contradictions in official statements, including those about events at the World Trade Center. He thus carried out his own investigation, which led him from surprise to surprise, each more astonishing and terrifying than the last.” The claim that Meyssan was not originally distrustful of official statements but was led to a radical change of mind as a result of his own painstaking examination of the facts illustrates Mark Fenster’s notions of narrative pivot and restoration of agency. The implication was that only after having connected the dots in a careful and unbiased manner had the author decided to publish his findings in the hope of convincing more and more readers and thus contributing to the unmasking of the conspirators. Confirming Hofstadter’s remarks about conspiracists’ obsession with footnotes and extensive documentation, Meyssan provided the reader with more than two hundred references, an extensive compilation of official material from the Bush administration, the FBI, and the CIA, investigative journalism articles from reputable media including CNN, the Washington Post, and Ha’aretz, op-ed pieces and interviews with major figures of the Bush White House (the president, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of

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Defense Rumsfeld, etc.), interspersed with much less documented assumptions, such as the use of radio beacons to explain the fact that the planes were able to hit the centres of the towers at a very low altitude and an average speed of 440 mph. “Given the low maneuvarability of these aircraft,” Meyssan wrote, “that would have been a remarkable feat even for an experienced pilot, let alone trainees” such as the hijackers (Meyssan 2002b, 33). The only credible explanation, therefore, was that the Boeings “would have been under remote control, like a drone – a plane without a pilot” (34). No corroborating evidence from the press or other sources was given for this particular claim, except an assertion that “the professional pilots we talked to confirmed that few among themselves could envisage performing such an operation and completely ruled it out in the case of amateur pilots” (34). Meyssan used a number of rhetorical strategies aimed at providing a seamless narrative that bridged documentary evidence with conjectural claims in order to lead the reader to the conclusion that “the attacks of September 11 were masterminded from inside the American state apparatus” (139). He was particularly fond of the trope including the reader in a select group of individuals (“we”) not as gullible as those who accepted the official version, repeatedly asking questions such as “Are we really to believe that the armed forces of the United States remained passive during the attacks?” (17) or “Could an operation of this nature have really been conceived and directed from a cave in Afghanistan, and then carried out by a handful of Islamic militants?” (39). Another expository tactic consisted of suggesting “hypotheses” (usually stated in the conditional mode) in response to statements described as not standing reason or scrutiny: “The question is no longer ‘was Tower 7 dynamited?’, but rather, ‘what other hypothesis can one formulate?’” with the help of “scoops” from the media (35). In chapter 3, the author argued on the basis of a New York Times report for the presence of “moles in the White House” who provided the hijackers beforehand with the presidential identification and transmission codes so that they could credibly inform the Secret Service of their plan to destroy the White House and Air Force One. Meyssan cited three diverging and sometimes contradictory media accounts regarding the attackers’ possession of these and other codes, including those of several key state agencies, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the Army, Navy and Marine Corps Intelligence offices.

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One thesis “would be that the Secret Service itself was infiltrated and let itself be fooled: the attackers never had the codes, but – thanks to accomplices – they made it seem believable” (2002b, 44, my emphasis). These suppositions obviously could not all be true at the same time: either the attackers had the codes or they did not. They were nevertheless presented in the next paragraph as evidence of a plot to undermine the government from inside: “Whatever the case may be, the business of the codes reveals that there exists [sic] one or more traitors at the highest levels of the state apparatus. It is they who might have posted snipers to shoot the President ... and it was to protect him from their ambushes that President Bush was forced to ride in armored vehicles on the landing fields of Barksdale and Offutt” (45, my emphasis). In other words, although the Bush administration was the target of a plot fomented at the highest levels of the state apparatus, his administration cleverly made use of the failed coup to strike the Taliban, invade Iraq, and advance the neoconservative agenda of regime change in the Muslim world. If September 11 was an insider job, then what about Osama bin Laden’s role in it? Meyssan’s book was one of the first to argue that the so-called Public Enemy No. 1 was in fact an agent of the United States who had been kept on the CIA payroll long after his days fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan two decades earlier. The al-Qaeda network had immediately been accused by the US and British governments of being behind the hijacking of the planes, and on 10 November, the Sunday Telegraph revealed the existence of a video cassette on which bin Laden claimed responsibility for the destruction of the Twin Towers, “pillars of American economic power,” adding that “these events were grandiose from all points of view. It was not only the Twin Towers, but the towers of that country’s morale which were destroyed” (cited in Meyssan, 2002b, 103). On 9 December, the Washington Post announced the existence of a second video cassette, which was made public a few days later by the Pentagon, leading Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to express on ABC’s This Week his hope that the new revelation “will finally put a stop to these insane conspiracy theories according to which in some way the United States or somebody else are the guilty parties.” For Meyssan, bin Laden was indeed guilty of conspiracy but with the US government insiders who had manufactured the attacks, not against them, and his guilt was beyond question precisely because “he has confessed to actions that never happened” (105).

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THE RISE OF THE TRUTHERS

The publication of L’effroyable imposture sparked a storm in the media, became the topic of a series of TV documentaries, talk shows, articles, and books denouncing his thesis as fabrication, rumour-mongering, outright propaganda, and an attempt to recast French anti-Americanism in ways better adapted to the new geopolitical environment. But the phenomenon was hardly limited to France: in 2003, two books questioning the official version of September 11 appeared in Germany, one by socialist politician and former Secretary of Defense Andreas von Bülow and the other by reporter Gherard Wiznewsky. It is significant that the most elaborate refutations appeared in France and Germany, the two countries whose political and cultural elites and public opinion alike most vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq. By 2004, the worldwide coalition of intellectuals, politicians, artists, journalists, scientists, bloggers, and militants known as the 9/11 Truth Movement had gained momentum in the United States as well, in part because the inability of the US military to find weapons of mass destruction after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime could only confirm earlier suspicions of the American government’s involvement in plotting the attacks. The Great Burning of Rome in 64 CE is the archetype of the catastrophic event generating unconfirmed rumours and resentment toward the sovereign, either for its incompetence or for its cynicism or both. According to Tacitus, Nero returned to the city as soon as he heard the news, and made several buildings accessible to the homeless, including his own Gardens. However, he was blamed for his lack of empathy, and words, rumours quickly spread that “while the city was burning, [the emperor] had gone on his private stage and, comparing modern calamities with ancient, had sung of the destruction of Troy” (Tacitus 1989, 360–368). As the fire raged on for several days, conspiracy theories emerged, imputing sinister plans to Nero, including the deliberate destruction of the city in order to later build a new one named after himself. The emperor famously tried to regain the favour of his people by blaming the Christians, torturing their leaders, and putting them to death in public spectacles. Even though what today’s secret services call false flag proposals obviously go back to ancient times, contemporary culture is particularly prone to distrust the powers that be. Request for transparency on the part of any authority and the multiplication of alternative, uncon-

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trollable sources of information has forced governments, business corporations, and other institutions to become increasingly secretive about their goals and their decisions. It was much easier to convince the citizenry of the inevitability of war or economic austerity fifty years ago, even in liberal societies, than it is now, and what Noam Chomsky called in the 1960s the manufacture of consent is increasingly difficult to achieve. As a result, corporate bodies from British Petroleum to the Catholic Church have tried to restrict access to information, in turn feeding suspicions that something is going on that they do not want you to know. And it cannot be good; otherwise, why would they want to hide it from you? Contrary to the “birthers” who denied that Barack Obama was born in the United States, the “truthers” who questioned the official version of 9/11 did not simply refute evidence: they produced counterevidence of their own, some of it resting on scientific legitimation. The partisans of the controlled demolition thesis, for example, claimed the impact of the planes was not sufficient to have caused the collapse of the buildings. Some physical cause of another nature must have been at work, most likely the use of explosives detonated from inside the towers at the same time as the external strikes. The allegation gave rise to a technical debate involving researchers from a variety of fields – physics, chemistry, astronomy, computer science, and architectural engineering. These were not militants, propagandists, or bloggers but credentialed scientists from highly ranked universities in the United States and abroad, including Purdue University and the University of Copenhagen. The discussion of nanothermite composites and the burning temperature of jet fuel raged on in the columns of professional reviews such as The Open Chemical Physics Journal and in science magazines with a wider circulation, from Popular Mechanics to Scientific American.3 A similar, if less wide-ranging, dispute also took place regarding the Pentagon site, following claims from Meyssan and others that the impact on the facade of the building was not large enough to have been made by a Boeing 757 but was the result of a missile launched from a fighter jet (Novitski 2001). Again, civil engineers weighed in on the allegation, mostly to debunk the missile theory, and every single television show on the topic brought in its own aeronautical expert, airline crash site investigator, or long-distance air carrier pilot to discuss some empirical evidence contained in the plane’s flight data recorders or the debris left on the ground. The controversy drew

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in respected government agencies such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which unsurprisingly backed the official version, and each camp ended up questioning the professional competence of the other. Although a highly charged political battle was being adjudicated in the supposedly neutral, objective, dispassionate court of scientific knowledge, agreement proved impossible. What are we to make of the fact that the protocols of rational inquiry failed to deliver on their promise to settle the matter once and for all? Tweeters, militants, and TV commentators are expected to be biased, but why would an engineering specialist lend credence to supposedly unfounded claims of conspiracy, unless she was convinced as a scientist of the validity of those claims? If experts armed with the methods of the physical sciences could not see eye to eye on the material “facts” of 9/11, how would anyone ever be able to find out what really happened? If engineers did not settle the dispute by firmly establishing what went on, the doubters would inevitably be caught in the infinite regress of interpretation that feeds conspiracy theories. Many organizations in the 9/11 Truth Movement demanded the creation of a non-partisan, unbiased international investigation into the matter. But who would lead such a fact-finding mission? How would the members of the investigative team be selected? Wouldn’t those whose expectations were not met by the results of the probe be sure to call foul play? The 9/11 Commission was supposed to be one of these objective entities, but not only did its conclusions fail to convince most skeptics, they became for the disbelievers part and parcel of the plot to hide the truth, as late as 2009, when Barack Obama mentioned in a speech directed at the Muslim world that “al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people.” Conspirationists as paranoids can never be convinced, since every piece of evidence put forward to discredit their views is immediately questioned as having been manufactured by their enemies, while every eyewitness or expert testimony is disqualified as having been coerced or bought. Our technological capacity to produce visual simulacra can only add to the ontological uncertainty that is central to the virtual world of cyber-reality. One of the most extreme theses regarding 9/11 was that no plane had actually hit the World Trade Center but that the clips of the burning towers were doctored with the help of holographic images that made missiles look like airplanes. Since the whole thing resembled a Hollywood terror movie anyway, why not assume that the video footage was just as much the product of special

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effects? The questioning of the indexical status of images equally applied to the still pictures of the Pentagon crash site or to the bin Laden videos released by Al-Jazeera the Bush administration used to prove once and for all that Public Enemy No. 1 had masterminded the bloodshed. The claim that the tapes were fake rested both on visual data (it was not really he on the tapes but a look-alike) and audio clues (the translation of the Arabic soundtrack into English was said to be either inaccurate or the brainchild of the US secret services). Some argued that the speaker was not only physically slightly different from bin Laden but that he could not have been a Muslim, since he was wearing a gold ring, which is strictly forbidden by Islamic faith (Morris 2001). The thesis of the doctored tapes was not only popular among supporters of al-Qaeda, as would be expected, but among growing numbers of truthers as well. Once again, academic expertise was brought to bear on the issue as a way of legitimizing counter-narratives. A German television documentary on the “Jalalabad tape” released in December 2001 included interviews with two independent translators and a scholar who all called into question the reliability of the soundtrack. Gernot Rotter, a professor of Islamic and Arabic Studies at the Asia-Africa Institute of the University of Hamburg, was quoted as saying that “the American translators who listened to the tapes and transcribed them apparently wrote in a lot of things they wanted to hear but that cannot be heard on the tape no matter how many times you listen to it.”4 The insistence by the speaker on several of the tapes that al-Qaeda bore the sole responsibility could only raise the suspicion that the leader’s avatar was overdoing it simply to discredit the thesis that the real bin Laden had not acted alone but in concert with the CIA. In a further twist of a system of interpretation spiralling out of control, some conspiracists maintained that the government of Iran, in its desire to establish that Shiites were the only true enemies of America, had used the thesis of the collusion between bin Laden and the US secret services to minimize the role played by a Sunni organization in the holy war against the infidels. Al-Qaeda could not take credit for having brought the evil empire to its knees, since they could not have pulled it off without the help of the American government itself. The complex network of narratives surrounding September 11 is not limited to contemporary developments; it reaches back to other defining moments in time, many of them also engulfed in the cul-

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ture of conspiracy. Suspicions of stonewalling have been raised after every single major act of terrorism in the past thirty years, including the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, the 2004 and 2005 mass killings in Madrid and London, and, of course, the assassination of bin Laden himself in 2011, immediately denounced as a governmental scheme to further accredit the official version of al-Qaeda’s responsibility in 9/11. Was the leader really dead, or was the whole operation a hoax? Why did the White House refuse to publish pictures of bin Laden’s body? Why were the remains not brought back onto American soil instead of being dropped in the ocean, thereby erasing all evidence? The Obama administration’s response that a proper burial according to Islamic tradition in the United States would have offended Muslims, inflamed jihadists and their supporters, and turned the slain leader of al-Qaeda into a martyr for the cause failed to convince the dissenters, and the suspicion machine was once again up and running. Tacitus’s account of the Great Fire in Rome contained an explicit reference to the destruction of Troy. As previously mentioned, September 11 has similarly been caught up in an extensive web of interrelated memories connecting it to previous events thought to have profoundly altered the course of history and produced significant cultural changes, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One measure of the impact of some of these moments on the collective psyche is the extent to which they found their way into the personal lives of countless witnesses through the media: “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” “What were you doing when the towers collapsed?” Most of us old enough to remember some of these events do so, as global and individual temporalities collide. Because they were televised, they have become part of the archival memory of entire generations, regularly revisited and commemorated, available at a stroke of the keyboard on the Internet. Although 22 November 1963, 9 November 1989, and September 11, 2001 were initially the results of national developments, they soon became world-historical events. Thierry Meyssan’s The Big Lie was one of the first attempts to explicitly link 9/11 to the Kennedy assassination. The core of the argument was based on a comparison between the CIA’s Operation Northwoods and the planned invasion of Iraq. The documents pertaining to the covert operation aimed at ending Fidel Castro’s regime after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 were declassified by the Clin-

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ton administration in the early 1990s at a time when Oliver Stone’s film JFK, released in 1991, had revived popular interest in the assassination. According to the data made publicly available, the aim of Operation Northwoods was “to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.”5 In order to achieve this objective, the project included a series of false-flag proposals including hijackings, bombings, and the introduction of false evidence incriminating the Cuban regime. One option was to attack the base in Guantánamo (another connection with post-9/11 developments), others included the destruction of a US ship in Cuban territorial waters (an incident reminiscent of the deliberate sinking of the USS Maine as a pretext for the Spanish-American war of 1898), a campaign of terror against Cuban exiles in Miami, the bombing of one of Cuba’s neighbours to spread fear of military aggression from Castro, the downing of a civilian charter plane on its way to the Caribbean, and even the destruction of a space flight with astronaut John Glenn on board to shock international public opinion and convince the world of the threat posed by communism. Substitute Saddam for the Cuban dictator and the targeting of a charter plane with the use of a commercial airline as a missile, and the connections are striking, which enabled Meyssan to link Operation Northwoods to the unproven claim that Kennedy was killed because he refused to go along with extremist anti-communist elements in the government, the secret service, and the military. The truthers’ quest may never be settled by scientific research conducted by aerospace engineers, political scientists, or cultural historians, even if archives are opened up and secret data published in the future, as in the case of Operation Northwoods, whose disclosure only fuelled more suspicions regarding the causes of Kennedy’s assassination. The 1980s “historians’ debate” (Historikerstreit) about Nazism in Germany or the “memory wars” in France opposing militant groups, professional historians, and conservative politicians in a dispute over the legitimate assessment of colonialism and the slave trade is evidence that history and memory are two different things and that both often end up being dragged, willy-nilly, into the political passions of the day. In anticipation of the tenth anniversary, an organization called ReOpen911 called for a mass demonstration in Paris to advocate for “peace and an end to the silence and state-sponsored lies regarding

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terrorism and illegal wars.”6 The event included the performance of a song called “Barry and Tower 7” (the building next to the World Trade Center that also collapsed) by a musical group involved in the Movement for the Truth on 9/11, an exhibition about Ground Zero, and a presentation on the results of the decade-long investigation of the facts. In addition, ReOpen911 commissioned a survey conducted in France from 6 June to 24 June 2011 in which 58 per cent of the individuals polled doubted the official version of September 11. Half of the respondents did not rule out the fact that the American authorities may have let the strikes happen, while 34 per cent found admissible the claim that the American government had been actively involved in some conspiracy in one form or another. In a similar poll conducted in Germany in January 2011, 90 per cent of the respondents did not believe the official version.7 The cycle of controversies, conspiracies, and self-fulfilling prophecies still had a bright future ahead.

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3 Resisting the Iraq War: Freedom Fries, Bonaparte, and the Two Europes

In an editorial published by the magazine France-Amérique in March 2017, two years after the killings of several journalists, cartoonists, and employees of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by two French jihadists, Guy Sorman, author of several books on the United States, declared that “L’antiaméricanisme, c’est fini” (French anti-Americanism is over). In Sorman’s view, “the spontaneous solidarity of the French with Americans after 9/11, and that of the Americans after [the murder of several journalists, cartoonists and employees of the satirical magazine] Charlie Hebdo show that anti-Americanism in France was never more than a political or literary expedient, what we call an ideology that replaced knowledge.” Sorman rightly underscored the mutual feelings of compassion and solidarity caused by the two events on both sides of the Atlantic. In the intervening years, however, the invasion of Iraq resulted in a period of prolonged tension between France and the United States and provided an opportunity for antiAmerican sentiments, however defined, to find a second wind. Not only did French President Jacques Chirac disagree with the Bush doctrine, as many other European leaders did, but his administration actively opposed it as a member of the United Nations Security Council. The ensuing widespread campaign denigrating France and things French on the Internet and the right-wing media in the United States was in no way unprecedented. In the 1960s, for example, angry demonstrators in New York City protested de Gaulle’s decision to pull France out of the NATO integrated military command and to close American military bases. The denationalization of French-style fried potatoes

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(originally from Belgium, by the way), renamed “freedom fries” on the menu of the US Congress restaurant, became the most publicized instance of a wave of national-populist “French-bashing” caused by the open rebellion against the United States by a nation whose citizens were described at the time as “cheese-eating surrendering monkeys” in reference to the French surrender to Hitler’s army in June 1940. PUNISH THE FRENCH

The White House did little to counter the widespread indignation occasioned by the French “betrayal” of US national interests in the Middle East. Bob Woodward reported in his book Plan of Attack that George W. Bush had told the Irish prime minister that “Chirac has pushed it to the point where there’s a huge anti-French backlash in America. He’s the butt of the jokes. He’s taken it too far” (Woodward 2004, 346). A few weeks later, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice reportedly summed up the future treatment of the three major players in the European resistance to US foreign policy: forgive the Russians, isolate the Germans, and punish the French. Although Rice never acknowledged using these words, the alleged quote captures the strong resentment shared by the administration, the conservative media, and their supporters against France, singled out for the harshest penalty (Gordo 2007). As more than 20 million people worldwide took to the streets to oppose the war in the spring of 2003, Iraq brought once again to the fore the question of the difference between Europe and America on issues of war and peace, a question that had somewhat been overshadowed since the end of the Vietnam War. Americans living in Paris claimed that the massive demonstrations were directed at the Bush White House, not at the American people. French supporters of US foreign policy argued on the other hand that most of the country, from its government to its people, was suffering once again from an acute case of irrational, hypocritical, and highly predictable bout of Americanophobia. Jean-François Revel noted that the collapse of communism in Europe had done nothing to decrease the passion of what he called “mechanical anti-Americanism.” The puzzling mystery about that sentiment, he wrote, “is not misinformation – since information regarding the United States is readily available – but the will to be misinformed.”

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While many traditional building blocks of what is known as antiAmericanism were indeed present in the controversy surrounding the Gulf War, some of them were being reconfigured in a new way as a response to the changing nature of the geopolitical context in the North Atlantic. One of the themes that figured prominently in the long history of French discourses on America and surfaced again in the post-9/11 context was the notion of Europe as a necessary counterweight to an excess of American power. Asked about the opposition of some European governments to the use of military force in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld retorted: “You’re thinking of Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s ‘old Europe.’ If you look at NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East.” Rumsfeld’s distinction between “old Europe” and “NATO Europe” did not properly account for the lack of consensus among America’s allies, however. A number of western European countries, some of them long-time members the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, lent their support to the US, such as Italy, Spain, and Denmark. On the other hand, many people in eastern Europe were just as opposed to the war as their neighbours to the west: 63 per cent of Poles, for example, disapproved of their government’s sending troops to the Middle East. The anti-war coalition did not share the same relationship with NATO, either. Russia was not in; Germany had joined the organization in 1955 but unlike France had never withdrawn from the integrated military command to pursue its own independent nuclear defence system. The defense secretary’s remarks pointed to the existence of competing definitions of “Europe.” Although the Bush administration clearly expected its western component to be united in its support of the US military engagement, Rumsfeld underscored the fact that the European Community as a political and economic rival to the United States was in fact unable to speak in a unified voice. The opposition to American foreign policy prompted Paris to advance its own interests and shore up its prestige and influence in Europe and in other parts of the world, notably in Africa. Chirac’s foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, was well known for his admiration for Napoleon and his Gaullist regard for France’s glorious past. The violent criticism from neoconservatives in the Bush administration may have been caused, among other things, by a perception that the French position, unlike the opposition from Germany or Belgium, was motivated by a nationalist agenda as uncompromising as their own. At the same time,

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Rumsfeld’s distinction between old and new Europe was aimed at countering the resurgence of pre-1939 beliefs in the radical incompatibility between (western) Europe and the United States. A TALE OF T WO CONTINENTS

Periods of tension with the United States have often been a catalyst for a renewed sense of European identity. Paul Valéry wrote at the end of his life that the Spanish-American war of 1898 had made him aware for the first time of the existence of such a thing as Europe: “A shock that reaches us in an unforeseen quarter can give us a sudden, novel sensation of the existence of our body as an unknown quality ... Thus that indirect blow in the Far East and this direct blow in the West Indies made me dimly perceive in myself something that could be affected and troubled by such events. I found I was ‘sensitized’ to situations that affected a kind of virtual idea of Europe which until then I had not known I held” (Roger 2005, 148). The Spanish-American war of 1898, the first time the United States had been in conflict with a European power since the war of 1812 against Britain, confirmed the validity of the medieval notion of translatio imperii, the inevitable motion of empire from east to west throughout the course of human history. As 1898 marked the start of old world misgivings about the projection of American power beyond the western hemisphere, calls for a united Europe became the rallying cry of opponents to US militarism, whether from the right or the left, in the decades following the First World War. By 1918, it had become clear to many that the European nations had foolishly taken one another to be the enemy instead of heeding the bigger threat from the west. The tables were turned; it was high time to apply the Monroe Doctrine to the old continent and prevent the United States from meddling in European affairs. André Suarès, one of the most violent critics of the United States, wrote in 1928 that “America made the Monroë [sic] principle play to its needs. Now it is demanding that Europe stay out of its affairs; and it intends to be the only judge of them ... It declines all authority, any international court” (288). The twenties and thirties shared two different, somewhat contradictory, views of the relationship between the old world and the new. For some, America was merely the monstrous child of Europe, the place where modernity had gone mad, creating a dystopian nightmare of proliferating machines and sprawling, polluted, inhumane

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cities. Others claimed on the other hand that far from being the misbehaved offspring of Europe, America was no relative at all. The American Way of Life had nothing to do with the old continent. Economist André Siegfried wrote in 1927 that “the old civilization of Europe did not really cross the Atlantic” (286). The ocean did not serve only as a deforming prism but as an impassable barrier. The American people, Siegfried went on, “is now creating on a vast scale an entirely original structure which bears only a superficial resemblance to the European,” and the difference between the two continents amounted to no less than “two epochs in the history of mankind.” In the words of Philippe Roger, Siegfried “swept away the last illusions of those who, like Valéry ... were still clinging to the notion that the United States was a ‘nation derived from Europe’ ... The United States had not relinquished European civilization; it had never received the delivery” (286–7). A similar process was at work, mutatis mutandis, in the post-9/11 era. Political scientist Dominique Reynié, who would later become a proponent of Europe as “an additional public power” acting alongside nation-states, argued in 2004 that 20 million Europeans marching against the war in Iraq argued for the emergence of a “fracture” within the West (Reynié 2004). German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk also supported the view of a decisive break, hailing Chancellor Gerhardt Schroëder, an active opponent of the Iraq war, as the ultimate representative of the “European type of Western identity.” Sloterdijk’s critique of a unified vision of the North Atlantic civilization and the distinction he drew between “the First West” (the United States) and “the Second West” (Europe) uncovered what Étienne Balibar called in 2003 “the ambiguities threatening the notion of a European political identity when, mirroring a certain kind of American rhetoric of ‘Western values,’ it tries to define itself in terms of an exclusive cultural identity” (Balibar 2003, 95). A parallel dispute also raged on the other side of the Atlantic, notwithstanding Rice and Rumsfeld’s pronouncements. Sociologist Jerome Rifkin enthusiastically rooted for the new Europe: “While the American Spirit is tiring and languishing in the past,” he wrote, “a new European dream is being born.” Rifkin contended that the emerging European culture, as it moved away from nationalism, favoured “community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth ... and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power.” British

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historian Timothy Garton Ash, on the other hand, questioned the paradigm of an absolute European difference. America and Europe were not strongly contrasted civilizations: “they belong to a wider family of liberal democracies, and one is better in some ways, the other in other ways.” The argument for family resemblances, Ash contended, might be “less interesting, less galvanizing, but it has the boring old merit of being true.”1 Robert Kagan, a long-time Republican foreign policy analyst and co-founder in 1997 of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century with William Kristol, also argued for a fundamental difference, although from another perspective than Rifkin’s and Sloterdjik’s. In Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2004), Kagan defended the notion that the two continents were separated by a growing chasm, the Europeans living in a post-Kantian paradise of unending peace while the United States remained mired in history, condemned to project its power across the globe. Balibar, although mostly a critic of Kagan, acknowledged that the invasion of Iraq called for a reexamination of the idea of Europe in response to the calls for resistance from prominent US-based scholars and public intellectuals such as Emanuel Wallerstein and Edward Said. The demand for dissent called for a new category of ideological agents, “European intellectuals,” urged to raise their voices in opposition to American power. Balibar readily took up the challenge and set out to delineate the contours of a new “European citizenship,” signalling a notable change in the French intelligentsia’s previous perception of its relation to the rest of the world, i.e., an appeal for a more modest, cosmopolitan view of the place of French intellectual culture in the world, freed from the Franco-centric withdrawn, inward-looking resentment that had followed World War II in many quarters. However receptive Balibar might have been to the international demand for a unified European intervention against the war, he nonetheless noted that the emerging narrative of the fractured West posed a serious political challenge. In his view, it could lead to the (re)constitution of an idealized collective entity, an essentialized imaginary and transferential Europe that harboured the hopes of all those who “count virtually on her to recapture the ideal combination of might and right America seems to be leaving behind” (Balibar 2003, 25). The transference from America to Europe of the mission to defend human and individual rights ran the risk of erasing Europe’s past responsibilities in the conflicts of the day, given the role played by

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French and British colonialisms in drawing the invented national borders of Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine. The countries responsible for the Holocaust and the Gulag were now called on to act as bulwark against the world’s “hyperpower,” as former French socialist Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine had called the United States. This being said, Europe was indeed more likely to defend the right to self-determination of nations and peoples than the United States, the new Hobbesian Behemoth, self-appointed universal judge of right and wrong that had just disregarded the United Nations’ resolution against invading Iraq, a UN member and a sovereign nation. France and Germany were praised in international progressive circles for standing up to the global superpower at a time when their respective citizenry was still struggling with the French colonial past and the legacy of Nazism. The new oppositional role devoted to Europe in some ways repeated the colonialist rhetoric of Europe’s civilizing mission, only this time America was the continent in need of being civilized. TOCQUEVILLE AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL ATLANTIC

Published one year after the invasion of Iraq, Robert Kagan’s essay on the new world order framed the transatlantic difference in explicitly gendered terms: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus” (Kagan 2004). Its thesis on the growing gap between Old Europe and the New World rested on a seductive philosophical reading of the fate of the Enlightenment legacy in postwar western Europe. “It is time to stop pretending,” Kagan wrote, “that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world.” While Europeans lived in a Kantian, post-Enlightenment paradise of perpetual peace, “the United States remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security still depends on the use of military might” (4). So much for the previous (and barely decade-old) widely shared narrative on the right that the fall of communism in 1989 had ushered in for humankind a new world-historical neoliberal epoch labelled “the end of history.”2 According to Kagan, that might have been true of western European democracies, but the United States had definitely missed the boat of post-history. Kagan’s book revived an old debate regarding the shared legacy of the philosophical Atlantic. Tocqueville famously argued that the Americans had unconsciously adopted “the philosophical method of

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the eighteenth century,” turning it into a powerful mixture of pragmatism and individualistic self-reliance, while religious pluralism tempered the worst excesses of abstract, radical Reason displayed during the Jacobin Terror in France. Echoing Freneau’s and Jefferson’s celebration of the Atlantic as a barrier against European evils, Tocqueville provided a prescient explanatory framework for the diverging histories that would unfold on each side of the transatlantic divide. Liberal interpreters of American political culture would later argue that the new world was spared both Robespierre and Bonaparte, revolution and reaction, and all that came after that, the Fabians and the Bolsheviks, Marx and Hitler, fascism, national socialism, and Stalinism, all the way to the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia. It is not that Americans would not face what Jefferson had called “the exterminating havocs” of war, oppression, and intolerance, from the genocide of Native Americans to slavery and the Civil War, but the nature and dynamics of these conflicts were not the products of another, foreign history from which the Republic had been miraculously spared by its insularity. Jean Baudrillard gave an ironic twist to the notion that the European nineteenth century, and its totalitarian legacy in the twentieth, never really crossed the Atlantic: “When I see Americans, particularly American intellectuals, casting a nostalgic eye towards Europe, its history, its metaphysics, its cuisine, and its past, I tell myself that this is just a case of unhappy transference. History and Marxism are like fine wines and haute cuisine: they do not really cross the ocean, in spite of the many impressive attempts that have been made to adapt them to new surroundings. This is a just revenge for the fact that we Europeans have never really been able to domesticate modernity, which also refuses to cross the ocean, though in the other direction” (Baudrillard 2002, 79). At the beginning of his classic study of American liberalism, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz quoted the famous passage in which Tocqueville summed up the whole of American exceptionalism: “Americans did not have a democratic revolution. They arrived on the soil they occupy in nearly the condition in which we see them at the present day; and this is of considerable importance” (Hartz 1991, 4). Hartz set out to convince his readers that liberalism was the natural ideology of a society shaped by “the tyrannical force of Lockean sentiment.” There was a significant divergence between Hartz and Tocqueville as to which strand of the Enlightenment tradition was more influential in the New World. For Hartz, it was Locke, and for

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Tocqueville, it was Descartes who held the key to open the black box of American exceptionalism. While Kagan saw contemporary Americans as hopelessly bogged down in historical hell, the French visitor claimed that by crossing the Atlantic, they had in large part escaped from history. As if frozen in time, Americans were “nearly” the same in 1830 as when they had first arrived on the shores of New England. None of the powerful social and intellectual forces that had thrown Europe into chaos between 1750 and 1815 seemed to have affected them. Although the citizens of the new Republic had little time for philosophical speculation and little interest in the fierce political struggles that divided Europe in the aftermath of the French Revolution, they shared what the Frenchman described as a common implicit, unexamined philosophical method rooted in the early principles of the European Enlightenment. “To seek the reasons of things for oneself, and in oneself alone; to tend to results without being bound to means, and to strike through the form to the substance – such are the principal characteristics of what I shall call the philosophical method of the Americans” (Tocqueville 2000, 403). The United States is therefore, he added, “one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and are best applied” (404). Tocqueville held contrasted views on America’s European heritage, annnoucing the contrast between Siegfried and Valéry noted earlier. On the one hand, he endorsed the narrative of filiation, the idea that America, for better or for worse, was the child of Mother Europe. On the other hand, he contended that a large portion of European culture and history had never crossed the Atlantic. His intent in writing Democracy in America was to distinguish what was universal in American history – i.e., democracy, the irrepressible movement toward liberty and equality – and what was specifically American, since only part of the Enlightenment legacy had made it to the other side: Descartes did but not Robespierre. Tocqueville’s conviction that America and Europe were two diverging shoots of the same philosophical branch led him to formulate one of the soundest piece of methodological advice anyone working on transatlantic relations can use: to carefully distinguish the common features of the democratic process in all modern industrial societies from what is specific to its American incarnation. One must be mindful not to confound, he advised, “several ideas that it is important to divide and examine separately” and not “mingle, unintentionally, what is democratic with what is only American” (36). “In spite of the ocean that intervenes, I

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cannot consent, “ he went on, “to separate America from Europe.” At the same time, “the position of the Americans is quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one” (38). At the end of his life, Tocqueville grew disenchanted with the evolution of the United States away from “the cause of true liberty” he had championed in his youth. Deeply concerned with the growth of illiberal nationalisms after the revolutions of 1848 in the old world, Tocqueville also voiced his disappointment with the growth of violence, intolerance, and corruption in the United States in a letter to an American friend dated 1 September 1856: “I have passionately desired to see a free Europe and I realize now that the cause of true liberty is more compromised today than it was during the time when I was born. I see around me nations whose souls seem to weaken as their prosperity and physical force grow, nations which remain, to borrow Hobbes’ phrase, robust children who deserve only to be treated by means of the stick and the carrot. Your America itself, to which once turned the dream of all those who lacked the reality of liberty, has given, in my view, for some time little satisfaction to these friends” (Craiutu and Jennings 2004, 403). Tocqueville had shared the same critical view of the dangerous abuse of its rising, unchecked power by the United States with another of his American correspondents on 29 August 1856: “What is certain is that, for some years now, you have strangely abused the advantages given to you by God which allow you to commit great errors with impunity. Viewed from this side of the ocean, you have become Hobbes’ puer robustus. By being so, you distress all the friends of democratic liberty, and delight all its opponents” (401). Hobbes seemed to have replaced Descartes as the philosophical key to understanding the evolution of American democracy away from its founding principles. The English political philosopher was convinced that the absolute power of the monarchy was the only corrective, in the age of revolutions, to the threat of the people, described as a puer robustus sed maliciosus, “a robust but malevolent boy” in need of correction. Tocqueville himself had already considered the misuse of freedom by a people unaccustomed to its benefits as a dangerous possibility thirty years earlier in his Democracy in America. “One cannot doubt,” he had argued, “that the moment when one accords political rights to a people who had been deprived of them until then is a moment of crisis, a crisis often necessary, but always dangerous. The

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child puts to death when he is ignorant of the price of life; he takes away the property of others before knowing that one can rob him of his. The man of the people, at the instant when he is according political rights, finds himself, in relation to his rights, in the same position as the child vis-à-vis all nature, and that is the case in which to apply to him these celebrated words: Homo puer robustus” (Tocqueville 2000, 229). The future would confirm Tocqueville’s concerns as the United States grew from a robust child to a powerful and ambitious adult. The Spanish-American war of 1898 and the subsequent control of Cuba and ownership of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines marked the entry of the United States into the elite club of imperial nations intent on projecting their military might onto the world scene. The invasion of Iraq followed a long list of American interventions abroad fought in the name of democracy against fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan, Soviet expansion in Latin America and Southeast Asia (Korea, Vietnam), and non-cooperative authoritarian regimes in the Arab world (Gulf War, 1990–91). To those critics of the United States familiar with that history, the second Iraq war was simply the latest chapter in a century of expansionism, the second half of it (since 1945) cemented as an often challenged, resisted, and hence never totally achieved Pax Americana. SOME AMERICANS ARE FROM VENUS TOO

Kagan’s analysis was questionable, of course, since “Europe” and “America” were not homogeneous totalities, as evidenced by those Americans who opposed unilateralism and preferred negotiations to preemptive strikes in Iraq or elsewhere, and his book expectedly met with a critical reception in the intellectual left. The somewhat reductive opposition between Hobbesian premodernity and Kantian postmodernity nevertheless brought the Enlightenment once again to the forefront of the translatlantic difference, since for Kagan “the roots of the present European worldview, like the roots of the European Union itself, can be traced back to the Enlightenment” (Kagan 2004, 8). The clear-cut binary opposition between Venus and Mars was reductionist: according to the polls conducted at the time, many Americans appeared to be living on Venus. According to figures from the Pew Research Center, one third of them did not approve of the military

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invasion of Iraq (March 2003), and the number of opponents to the endless war grew steadily during the next three years to reach the 50 per cent mark in February 2006. A decade later (January 2014), 52 per cent of respondents to a survey by the same polling institute considered that the US had failed to achieve its goals in Iraq, while 37 per cent claimed it had succeeded and 38 per cent still maintained that going to war was the right decision. There was “little in the way of partisan differences on the subject of success in Iraq three years after the end of the war. About four-in-ten Democrats, Republicans and independents said in January [2014] that the U.S. had succeeded in achieving its goals in Iraq. That was a big fall off for Republicans, 68% of whom said in November 2011 that U.S. efforts had succeeded.”3 December 2011 marked the low ebb of the gradual withdrawal of troops from Iraq under Barack Obama’s presidency. Donald Trump reversed the trend in January 2020 following threats to the US Embassy in Baghdad from Iran-backed Shia militia and their supporters. The validity of Kagan’s frequent use of the Kantian reference has been questioned as well, notably by Étienne Balibar, who remarked that his colleague seemed “to confuse two moments of the German philosopher’s reflection on history by identifying the project of ‘perpetual peace’ with a project of ‘world government’ that, for Kant, ran the risk of despotism” (Balibar 2003, 99, n18). The French philosopher also noted that in reference to America’s hyperpower, Kagan had not used the expected Hobbesian allegory of the Leviathan (as the absolute rule of the sovereign aimed at restoring peace and order) but rather that of the Behemoth, a source of chaos and destruction. Perhaps unwittingly, Kagan had introduced into his own argument the “European” perception of American hegemony as a destructive force let loose in the world. THE EUROPEAN UNION : HOW MANY DIVISIONS ?

Sixty years after the end of World War II, Europe was both an economic giant and a military dwarf (at least compared to the United States), a fact that stood at the heart of Kagan’s objections to multilateralism. Western Europeans could afford to live in the post-Kantian paradise of perpetual peace and seemingly endless prosperity because the United States had to shoulder the burden of their defence and substitute for their failing military strength when needed, as during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia a decade earlier. When French

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Foreign Minister Pierre Laval, who needed the support of both the Communist Party and the Catholic Church at home in his attempts to combat the Nazi threat, asked Stalin in 1935 to respect religious rights in the Soviet Union, as the Vatican was doing, the Communist leader famously replied: “The Pope, how many divisions has he got?” Étienne Balibar’s reflections on the role of Europe in the new multipolar world order were rooted in an acknowledgment, and paradoxical welcoming, of Europe’s military weakness. Europe should no longer conceive of itself as a counterpower to the United States but take advantage of its vulnerability to pose a new kind of challenge to war on the world stage. Balibar advocated an “anti-strategy of powerlessness” that would cause Europe to fade away as a specific civilization distinct from other world cultures. As a “vanishing mediator,” the old continent would help to bring about a new era of international relations, based on cooperation and negotiation rather than armed conflict. “There are no absolute borders between the European space, as it was constituted historically and culturally, and the spaces that surround it,” Balibar contended. “If Europe has no borders, it is because it is itself a border ... or more precisely, a superposition of borders, of relations among the world histories and cultures she reflects in her midst” (Balibar 2003, 33). The deconstructive notion of a borderless space addressed the ambiguities inherent in any attempt to describe the continent as having an exclusive historical definition. The same year that the march to war in the Middle East was hotly debated, the dispute over whether the new European Constitution should include an explicit reference to “Christian values” mobilized competing version of cultural identity. Despite pressures from the Vatican, the French and German positions prevailed, and the final Preamble of the Constitution mentioned Europe’s religious legacy without making an explicit reference to Christianity. The first two paragraphs outlined the members’ understanding of and commitment to what Kagan had called Europe’s postKantian paradise. The preamble drew its “inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.” The document went on to affirm the belief “that Europe, reunited after bitter experiences, intends to continue along the path of civilization, progress and prosperity, for the good of all its inhabitants, including the weakest and most deprived; that it wishes to

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remain a continent open to culture, learning and social progress; and that it wishes to deepen the democratic and transparent nature of its public life, and to strive for peace, justice and solidarity throughout the world.”4 It turned out that the Europeans were not the only ones to re-examine their histories and geographies with some trepidation. Donald Rumsfeld’s opposition between the two Europes was a strategically motivated attempt at a geopolitical remapping of the old continent by drawing up new borders and inventing new entities to protect American interests and delegitimize unreliable allies. Of all the members of the new Axis of Evil, only North Korea was a holdover from the Cold War and Reagan’s view of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” The paranoid structure of international relations still worked in the case of Iraq, but the phobic object had changed and the end of the Cold War dealt an entirely new hand of ideological cards to political actors. In the eyes of the anti-communist crusaders, Stalinism and Maoism had their roots in the excesses of the post-Enlightenment age of revolutions; they were the embodiment of totalitarian Reason, the brainchild of the illiberal continental Master Thinkers, from Rousseau to Hegel to Marx: 1917 was nothing but 1793 on a larger scale. The Islamic threat, on the other hand, was entirely the product of the pre-rational, medieval past of humankind. Emerging from outside the borders of the West and before the Renaissance and the Reformation, it signalled the collapse of pre-modern cultures into a postmodernity that threatened religion-based institutions in Asian and African traditional societies. The so-called neoconservative agenda that played such a significant role in US foreign policy in the Arab world after 9/11 had its roots in Cold War anti-communism, if only because many of its proponents were former left-wing critics of Stalinism turned champions of regime change abroad to export democracy. While the rhetoric of the free world had found new opponents in political Islam and noncooperative Arab dictatorships, it also exhibited an unexpected connection with France’s revolutionary past. NEOCONSERVATIVES AS NEO - JACOBINS

A few months into the Iraq war, a conservative American political scientist argued that the current US foreign policy was inspired by the French Revolution. In an article entitled “The Ideology of American Empire,” Claes G. Ryn, a professor at the Catholic University of Amer-

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ica, argued that “the entire world view” behind the Bush doctrine presented striking similarities with Jacobinism. After eliminating their main competitors, known as the Girondists, the Jacobins became the main architects of the Terror of 1793–94, during which tens of thousands of “enemies of the Revolution,” from monarchists to liberal republicans, were jailed and executed. Ryn called the White House foreign policy advisors “neo-Jacobins,” and the label, which was warmly endorsed by libertarians and those traditional conservatives who had serious concerns about invading Iraq, quickly found its way into the wider world of politics (Ryn 2003a). The author’s thesis was quickly expanded into a book whose title, America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (2003), combined an obvious reference to Robespierre’s république de la vertu (revolutionary France as the Republic of Virtue) with an indictment of the American Jacobins’ imperial designs and missionary zeal. The paradox of Ryn’s argument cannot have escaped its author: in the months leading up to the publication of his piece in Orbis, the journal of the conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, George W. Bush’s supporters had routinely denounced the French government as a threat to American security and national interests. At the same time, Jacques Chirac’s opposition to a military intervention in Iraq, eloquently articulated by his Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin at the United Nations, was frequently related by commentators to the French president’s self-described Gaullism, a form of national-republicanism often associated with the Jacobin and Bonapartist legacies. If Ryn’s assessment of the intellectual roots of the Bush administration’s foreign policy was correct, then the FrenchAmerican struggle over Iraq looked in retrospect more like a case of rival Jacobinisms, pitting one universalistic nationalism against another, the liberator nation of the past and the saviour nation of the present. In an ironical case of the return of the repressed, France’s most vociferous opponents were unmasked as heirs to one of the most violent terroristic ideologies born of the age of revolutions. Ryn’s provocative thesis was rooted in Edmund Burke’s early critique of the French revolutionary upheaval in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), written three years before the Jacobins actually came to power. The “Old Whig” father of liberal Angloconservatism (as distinct from the légitimiste, reactionary views of de Maistre and de Bonald in France) blamed the French revolutionaries for having destroyed, in the name of abstract, metaphysical ideas, the

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organic order of European customs and traditions passed down from one generation to the next. Burke contrasted Britain’s Glorious Revolution, whose aim had been, in his view, to preserve ancient rights, customs, and liberties, with the iconoclastic frenzy with which the French were bent on doing away with all the cultural, religious, or political remnants of their own past. Ryn’s interpretive strategy was to plot the Burkean indictment of the French republicans’ tabula rasa radicalism on today’s neoconservative agenda, drawing a direct line from the disciples of Rousseau to those of Leo Strauss. The neo-Jacobins were said to have borrowed or, better yet, inherited from their forerunners a moralistic view of politics rooted in arrogant, intolerant self-righteousness, a penchant for the metaphysical One over the historical Many, an unquestioned belief in their mission as an instrument of universal right in the world-historical struggle against evil and a global will to power masquerading under the claim of doing the work of Providence, whether defined in sacred (Christian) or secular (Enlightenment) terms. Ryn’s account calls to mind the medieval doctrine of Dei gesta per Francos (the Deeds of God through the Franks), an allegorical mixture of historical narrative and moral exhortation that eulogized the Crusades as the fulfillment of divine will while glorifying the French as priviledged instruments of Providence. In the same way that the imperial mantle was passed from Rome to Frankish Gaul in the medieval version of the translatio imperii (transfer of imperial rule), the baton had now passed from Bonaparte to Bush, described by Ryn in one of his publications as “the Jacobin in Chief.” The neo-Jacobins’ desire to spread democracy around the world displayed the same ruthlessness and the same recklessness as the French armies of the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire exported liberty, equality, fraternity and the rights of Man throughout Europe at the end of their bayonets, thereby forcing people to be free. “The Jacobins,” Ryn wrote, “set out to liberate man. The notion that America’s military might is the greatest force for freedom in human history recalls Rousseau’s famous statement that those who are not on the side of political right may have to be ‘forced to be free’” (Ryn 2003b, 395). From one exceptionalism to the next: in Ryn’s view, the famous piece in the Wall Street Journal in which William Kristol and David Brooks called for a new “national-greatness conservatism” serving the purpose of a country that had become, with the end of the Cold War, the one and only superpower (Kristol and Brooks 1997) echoed the

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self-representation of revolutionary France as the “Great Nation” bound to free the oppressed peoples of Europe from the despotism of the throne and the altar. In his genealogy of American neoconservatism, Justin Vaïsse endorsed Ryn’s thesis without referencing it: “The universalism of democracy was yet another tenet of the neoconservative credo adopted by Bush. Unlike realists, who prefer to accommodate existing authoritarian regimes and often look upon culture as a factor with the potential to slow or even prevent a country from evolving toward democracy, neoconservatives are strict universalists. In this respect, they can be compared to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In both, one finds the same ambiguous mix of universalism and nationalism: progress, whether it takes the form of ‘reason’ and le Code civil or of democracy and elections, turns out, as if by magic, to be spontaneously compatible with the strategic interests and dominance of the power that promises to achieve it, be it la grande nation (France) or ‘the benevolent empire’ (The United States)” (Vaïsse 2011, 2). THE PERSISTENCE OF FRANCOPHOBIA

Ryn’s account is best read in the context of the renewed critique of French republicanism in the United States during the decade leading up to 9/11. The political scientist’s berating of the French Revolution showed that he shared with many of his compatriots the usual tenets of Francophobia, a collection of time-tested clichés, prejudices, obsessions, sensitivities, allergies, and accurate statements regarding many aspects of Gallic culture and history, from aristocratic tastes in food and fashion to elitist aesthetic categories and insufficiently democratic political institutions. Centralization and elitism have long been viewed by their critics as incompatible with the central values of the American national enterprise, its egalitarian ethos, on the one hand, and its distrust of oppressive government, on the other. The trouble with France was systemic, the by-product of a model that linked statism with a deep-seated scorn for mass culture, commerce, and technological innovations applied to the life of the mind. Originally conceived at the King’s court, it became the guiding principle of the republican state’s politique culturelle, from the Académie Française and the Ministry of Culture to Centre Beaubourg and Opéra-Bastille. This very model, which stood in stark contrast to the project of American

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liberalism, was responsible for the now anachronistic, marginal character of high culture in contemporary France. The Jacobin legacy also seemed alive and well in the stubborn attachment of the French to the postwar welfare state responsible for the sorry state of their economy, plagued by endemic two-digit unemployment.5 As attested by Ryn’s unforgiving reference to neo-Jacobinism to discredit his neoconservative opponents, the terms of the debate had not changed much since the days of Robespierre and Hamilton, who drew in 1793 a sharp contrast between the two recent illustrations of the Age of Revolution. “Would to Heaven,” he wrote, “that we would discern in the mirror of French affairs the same humanity, the same decorum, the same gravity, the same order, the same dignity, the same solemnity, which distinguished the cause of the American Revolution ... When I observe that Marat and Robespierre, the notorious prompters of these bloody scenes, sit triumphantly at the Convention ... I acknowledge that I am glad to believe that there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America and what is the cause of France – that the difference is no less great than that between Liberty and Licentiousness” (Hamilton 1969, 475–76). Throughout the 1990s, many Anglo-American journalists and scholars of France continued to level charges that often did little more than update the liberal critique of Rousseau’s legacy, from Edmund Burke and Benjamin Constant to Isaiah Berlin. As Tony Judt once put it, “of all the enemies of liberalism and rights the French Republicans proved to be the most ‘deadly’ because they managed to stay in power for so long, replacing the ideal of liberty with the unfortunate notion of ‘a universal and undifferentiated democracy’” (Judt 2003, 24). The French had it coming, unaware as they seemed to be of the limitations of their national idea (obsolete in a post-imperial world order) and of their snobbish, bookish conception of the life of the mind (doomed by the triumph of electronic culture). France had been under attack in the United States from the neoliberal right for being insufficiently receptive to free-market ideas and from the liberal left for being insufficiently open to pluralism, another unfortunate consequence of the Jacobin legacy and its “universal and undifferentiated” conception of democracy. In the eyes of multiculturalists, Gallic culture, still dominated by illiberal notions of assimilation and homogeneity, remained profoundly hostile to minority rights and ethnic diversity.6 The persistence of anti-French sentiments in the nineties prepared the ground for the backlash

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against France in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq and again over the French reactions to the series of Islamist attacks after 2015 (see further in chapter 6 and the conclusion). Ryn’s account of the worst excesses of the Club des Jacobins’ dictatorship was part of a long line of Anglo-American liberal and conservative writings against France’s statist, elitist, and universalistic culture. However, “neoBonapartist” would have been a more accurate label to qualify those who had engineered the fall of Saddam Hussein. The neoconservatives did share with the Bonapartist wing of the French Right a Cesarean belief in the superiority of the executive branch as guarantor of national unity and security, a militant devotion to the Reason of state, and a distrust of elected bodies, whether domestic or foreign.7 Other common features included a deep scorn for the press and the liberal intelligentsia (Constant, de Staël, and the Idéologues in 1803 and the op-ed writers of the New York Times and the Washington Post 200 years later), viewed as weak-kneed, naive, and dangerous, since wartime dissent is a threat to the national interest and a penchant for the “projection” of military might in ever-increasing spheres of influence (e.g., Bonaparte’s campaigns in Europe and Egypt and those of his nephew Louis-Napoléon in Italy, Crimea, and Mexico during the Second Empire). NEO - JACOBINS OR NEO - BONAPARTISTS ?

In a short piece in The American Conservative entitled “Jacobin in Chief: Exporting the French Revolution to the World” (11 April 2005), Ryn revived and somewhat revised his original thesis by comparing George W. Bush’s second inauguration to the installation of “an American Emperor, but one far more powerful and far more ambitious than any Roman counterpart. Neo-Jacobin ideology can be seen as the perfect justification of American imperial power.” The connection among imperial Rome, Napoleonic France, and the contemporary United States showed that Ryn’s definition of “Jacobinism” was broad enough to view Bonaparte’s rule as continuous with the republican phase of the French Revolution. Whether the young general was a Jacobin in the narrow, partisan sense of the term has been the subject of much historical debate ever since the exiled emperor claimed in his Memoirs that his youthful enthusiasm for the Revolution was a mixture of ignorance and opportunism.

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Ryn’s new piece enjoyed an immediate success among the anti-Bush Republican circles. In addition to lending his critique a measure of philosophical and historical legitimacy, Ryn made the case that neoconservatism was a misnomer, that the “war party” that dictated American foreign policy was trampling underfoot every single principle of the conservative world view, from Burke’s skepticism regarding the ability of the human species to create a rational utopia to Ronald Reagan’s willingness to sit down and talk with Gorbachev. In the words of Justin Raymondo, one of Ryn’s ardent supporters, the neo-Jacobins’ agenda was “a revolutionary project, one that violates the precepts of the Founders – and would have to mean the overthrow of the Republic” (Raymondo 2003). This narrative, however appealing it may have been to conservatives, suffered from some of the pitfalls common to any exercise in comparative political philosophy that looks for ideological influence and transference across space and time. The problem with ideologies is that they hardly lend themselves to neat descriptions as coherent sets of logically consistent, historically unchanging principles, as in the usual complaint from philosophical pragmatists about the nominalist, reductive nature of any word ending in “ism.” Abstract, reified categories have a way of downplaying the complexities of human ideas and the actions they justify, even within the framework of a single movement, party, or school of thought. Ryn readily conceded that many of those who “speak about an American global mission to spread democracy ... combine Jacobin ideas with other elements of thought and imagination: rarely, if ever, is an individual all of a piece. Contradictory ideas often compete within one and the same person.” The purpose of the analysis nevertheless remained, in his own words, “to elucidate an ideological pattern, showing how certain ideas form a coherent, if ethically and philosophically questionable, ideology” (Ryn 2003b, 386). The question, however, is whether “Jacobinism” or “neoconservatism” are coherent and unchanging ideologies. WOULD ROBESPIERRE BE A NEO - JACOBIN TODAY ?

In The Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, François Furet argued that “the work of time” had profoundly altered the meaning of the original set of beliefs shared by the members of the Club des Jacobins between 1789 and 1794. As a consequence of what Furet called “the

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semantic elasticity of the term in late twentieth-century French politics,” Jacobinism had come to mean different things to different people, all the way down to the present (Furet 1989, 710). Among the principles making up the various kinds of Jacobinism, Furet listed “a wide range of predilections: indivisible national sovereignty, a state role in the transformation of society, centralization of the government and bureaucracy, equality among citizens guaranteed by uniformity of the law, regeneration through education in republican schools, or simply an anxious concern for national independence” (710). Furet went on to note that the figure of a sovereign public authority dominating civil society that is the core of the common representation of Jacobinism was quite paradoxical, since the Jacobins’ role in the radicalization of the revolutionary process was based on the constant usurpation of the power of the Convention, the legislative branch that had been invested with popular sovereignty as a result of the elections of September 1792. Remarking on the contrast between the theory and practice of historical Jacobinism and the kind of respectable, consensual legitimacy given to the concept after 200 years of reinterpretation, Furet argued that collective memory had turned the Jacobin legacy from revolutionary patrimony to national property, shared equally by the Left and the Right, through a process of “bourgeoisification.” “Having achieved this level of historical dignity, the concept has shed its subversive character along with any semblance of a precise definition. Yet by reminding people of the virtues of a strong state promoting progress and representing the interests of the nation, it has made it possible to link the Jacobin tradition to what came before and after, and thus to stitch back together what the Revolution put asunder. By forming a bridge between the old monarchy and the Napoleonic state, the Jacobin tradition seems to have become part of the family” (711). Ryn’s own use of the Jacobin reference owed a lot to this rewriting of history by subsequent generations, with the difference that his views were rooted in the Anglo-conservative retrospective reading of the French Revolution rather than in its French national-republican reconstruction. Take, for example, the idea, central to his argument, that the Jacobins were the first modern imperialists, bent on converting the whole of Europe to the rational and moral truth underlying their political agenda. In fact, it was their rivals in the Assembly, the Girondists, who were pushing for war with the European monarchies as early as the end of 1791, and Robespierre who had railed from the

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start against the idea of a military conflict that would weaken the revolution and possibly threaten its very existence. In a speech to the Société des Jacobins on 18 December 1791, Robespierre argued that war was always an oppressive tool in the hands of a tyrannical government. “It is in wartime,” he said, “that executive power deploys the most dangerous energy and exercises a kind of dictatorship that can only frighten nascent liberty ... It is in wartime that the habit of passive obedience and the natural enthusiasm for successful leaders turn the soldiers of the fatherland into the soldiers of the monarch or of his generals” (Robespierre 1957, 48-9). The orator expressed serious doubts about his opponents’ view that “as soon as we declare war, we will see all the thrones crumble at once,” a statement reminiscent of Vice President Cheney’s claim that American troops would be welcomed as liberators and that the shining example of a democratic Iraq would immediately serve the cause of freedom throughout the Middle East. “As for me, I can’t help but see how slow the progress of liberty is in France,” Robespierre said, and “I must say that I do not yet believe in the freedom of peoples stultified and enslaved by despotism” (49). The dangers of a foreign war and the corruption of those who would profit from it weighed heavily against the belief in what “the prodigious deeds a great people rushing to the conquest of the world’s freedom” could accomplish, a belief Robespierre admitted sharing with his fellow revolutionaries. But attacking the European monarchies would provide the pretext they were looking for to crush the revolution and would pave the way for a military despot relying on the blind devotion of his troops. The only legitimate war was a defensive one, not a war of choice but one of necessity, to use categories forged during the debate over Iraq. “Besides, when are free men, or those who wish to be so,” Robespierre asked, “able to deploy all the resources required by such a cause? When they fight at home, for their homes, in front of their fellows citizens, their wives and their children ... That is when leaders forced to act before the eyes of their fellow citizens are no longer able to commit treason with success or impunity, forced as they are to act in front of their compatriots. All these advantages are lost when war is waged away from the homeland, in a foreign country ... It is no longer the entire nation who fights for herself, it is an army, it is a general who decides the destiny of the state” (61). Robespierre only consented to support armed conflict months later when the fatherland was on the defensive, under threat of foreign

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invasion, following the initial defeats of the revolutionary armies in the summer of 1792. Far from articulating Ryn’s “ideology of empire” and advocating hegemony in the name of triumphant Reason, the Jacobin leader tirelessly called for prudence and moderation. He resumed his discours sur la guerre on 2 January 1792, accusing the war party of deliberately misusing the American Revolution to justify military intervention abroad: “What do we care, for example, of your long and pompous disquisitions on the American war? What is there in common between the open war waged by a people against its tyrants and the systematic political intrigue instigated by the government itself against nascent freedom” (79). As a matter of fact, Ryn’s so-called neo-Jacobins in the White House could have benefitted from Robespierre’s advice during the “reconstruction phase” following the fall of Saddam Hussein when it became clear that not everyone welcomed American soldiers as liberators. “The most extravagant idea that can rise in the mind of a politician,” Robespierre argued, “is to believe that it is enough for one people to conquer another militarily to make the latter adopt the other’s laws and constitution. Nobody likes armed missionaries; and the first piece of advice from nature and prudence is to repel them as enemies” (81–2). In his Reflections on the Way the War Is Being Waged (July 1792), he lashed out against the exactions of the French generals whose troops behaved as an occupation army in neighbouring Belgium while fighting the Austrians. In “Robespierre et la question de la guerre,” historian of the French Revolution Anne-Marie Coustou notes that “while the inhabitants of the town [of Courtrai] had welcomed the French soldiers ‘like brothers,’ and had helped them ... defeat several Austrian army corps, the [French] military command later decided to abandon the town and retreat to Lille” after burning Courtrai’s outskirts to impede the advance of the enemy. Robespierre “expressed feelings of sadness and powerless rage” upon learning about what amounted to “the disgrace of revolutionary France” (Coustou 2016, 18). L’Incorruptible, as his supporters called him, became increasingly isolated as the war went on, and his worst fears regarding the future of Caesarism would come true, although he did not live to see the rise of Bonaparte. Following his execution and the end of the Terror in 1794, the Jacobins’ opponents established “sister republics” all over Europe, heavily taxing their “liberated” neighbours in order to keep themselves in power and fund additional conquests, and, as the Incorruptible had foreseen, a general soon turned emperor rose from the ashes of the Thermidorian Reaction.

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Whether the architects of US foreign policy after 9/11 were neoJacobins is open to debate: it all depends on what is meant by Jacobinism. Robespierre did not believe in foreign war either as a moral imperative or a providential mission. Marx once said that he was no Marxist: based on the excerpts from his speeches quoted above, Robespierre would not be a neo-Jacobin today. His war-weary stance of 1791–92, aimed at protecting and strengthening the revolution at home rather than wasting lives and resources abroad, was closer to Pat Buchanan’s isolationist, Jacksonian nationalism than to the neoconservatives’ brand of “muscular Wilsonianism” (to borrow a phrase from Francis Fukuyama). In fact, the Jacobin orator’s jaundiced view of “armed missionaries” resonates with George W. Bush’s purely conservative statement during one of the presidential debates of 2000, a year before 9/11 made him change his mind: “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building.” WERE RYN ’ S “ NEO - JACOBINS ” TRULY NEOCONSERVATIVES ?

Ryn’s characterization of neoconservatism itself raises as many questions as his view of neoconservatives as neo-Jacobins, and the Cold War neocons preferred to be called “neo-Reaganites (Kristol and Kagan 1996). In America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006), Francis Fukuyama attempted to set the record straight regarding the nature of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, starting with a candid assessment of his own credentials as a neoconservative: “I started fairly hawkish on Iraq ... In the year immediately preceding the invasion, I was asked to participate in a study on long-term U.S. strategy toward the war on terrorism. It was at this point that I finally decided the war didn’t make sense ... I have spent much time since then wondering whether I had somehow changed my views in a way that disqualified me as a neoconservative or whether the neoconservative supporters of the war were misapplying common principles we all shared” (Fukuyama 2006, x). Echoing Furet on Jacobinism, Fukuyama described neoconservatism as much more complex that what its opponents had made it out to be. He maintained that it “was based on a set of coherent principles that during the Cold War yielded by and large sensible policies both at home and abroad” but drew a distinction between neoconservative principles and their interpretation, thereby setting the stage for his own cri-

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tique of the Bush doctrine. “The principles, however, could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and during the 1990s they were used to justify an American foreign policy that overemphasized the use of force and led logically to the Iraq war” (xi). While acknowledging that “neoconservatism has become irreversibly identified with the policies of the administration of George W. Bush” and that it would make little sense “to reclaim the label at this point” (xi), Fukuyama nevertheless devoted the entire opening chapter of his book to the “neoconservative legacy.” In his view, the foundational principles had been “misapplied” by misguided “interpreters” after the fall of communism and were in need of being rescued as the basis for the new “Wilsonian realism” that should replace the failed policies of the first term of the Bush presidency. The constitutive principles that “distinguish neoconservatives from the other schools of thought about foreign policy” (48) included “a belief that the internal character of regimes matters (a line of thought directly borrowed from Strauss) and that foreign policy must reflect the deepest values of liberal democratic societies ... a belief that American power has been and could be used for moral purposes, and that the United States needs to remain engaged in international affairs ... a distrust of ambitious social engineering projects ... and finally, skepticism about the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve either security or justice” (49). Fukuyama resembled Ryn in that he saw neoconservatism, as the latter did Jacobinism, as a coherent doctrine, at least in principle. And yet, he also contended that by the end of the Cold War there was no longer any “agreement among neoconservatives on the extent to which democracy promotion or human rights should underlie U.S. foreign policy” (39). At this point, the reader could legitimately be confused: how consistent could the original principles have been if they subsequently lend themselves to such divergent interpretations? The answer: “The fact that neoconservatism is not monolithic does not imply that it does not rest on a core of coherent ideas. Rather, it is a confluence of intellectual streams that have resulted in areas of ambiguity or disagreement among conservatives” (14). Fukuyama also noted that it had become increasingly more difficult in the previous thirty years “to disentangle neoconservatism from other, more traditional varieties of American conservatism, whether based on small-government libertarianism, religious or social conservatism, or American nationalism” (39). Again, how distinctive, one

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might ask, can the original principles have been if they so readily lend themselves to entanglement with other ideas previously described by the author himself as wholly incompatible? There were two reasons for the gradual erosion of the neoconservative difference by the late seventies. On the one hand, mainstream conservatives adopted many of the neoconservative views on welfare and foreign policy, and on the other, many neoconservatives began to align themselves with traditional conservatives, gradually moving away from their own roots in the socialist Left. Fukuyama’s comments confirmed Furet’s account of the inevitable refiguration of political ideas over time. What happened in France to Jacobinism, transformed by a century of social and political struggles from revolutionary radicalism to mainstream republican credo, also applied, mutatis mutandis, to the neoconservative agenda. A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOCONSERVATISM

Justin Vaïsse’s Neoconservatism. The Biography of a Movement provides a useful chronological framework to understand the evolution of the movement and the contradictory nature of some of its elements by distinguishing its three successive “ages.” The generation of the Founding Fathers (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, S.M. Lipset, Nathan Glazer, and Patrick Moynihan), from 1965 to the 1990s, consisted of intellectuals and academics, many of them former socialists turned democrats, who had gradually become disenchanted with post–New Deal liberalism. They resented its leftward drift during the sixties evidenced by Johnson’s “Great Society,” the war on poverty, the emergence of the New Left and the counterculture, quotas and affirmative action, income redistribution, and, more generally, everything they saw as the failure of “social engineering.” Fukuyama shared Vaïsse’s view of the the first generation, many of them former classmates at City College of New York (CCNY) who differed sharply from mainstream American conservatives on foreign and domestic policies, their agenda having been shaped by what Francis Fukuyama aptly called “the anticommunism of the disillusioned Left” (cited by Vaïsse 2011, 16). While traditional Republicans opposed communism because it was atheistic and anti-capitalist, the CCNY group had “sympathized with the social and economic aims of communism, but in the course of the 1930s and 1940s came to realize that ‘real existing socialism’ had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused” (16).

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The second phase (1972–92) was that of the “Scoop Jackson’s Democrats,” who in reaction to the “New Politics” associated with George McGovern and to the “realist” foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger, had desperately tried to bring the Democratic Party back to the centre and the “Cold War liberalism” of the Truman era. Having failed to do so, the hawkish democrats (Kirkpatrick, Wattenberg, Novak, Muravchik, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Pipes, Krauthammer, Fukuyama) drifted towards the Reagan conservatives, with whom they shared an opposition to isolationism and détente (from the Helsinki agreements to the SALT II Treaty) and a fondness for Churchill, Solidarnosc, the AFL-CIO, and the silent majority. It was during this second period that Michael Harrington coined the term “neoconservative.” Vaïsse noted that the neocons of the third generation (from 1995 on), unlike their predecessors, were born and raised in conservative families and lived in Washington, DC (the seat of political power) rather than in New York (the country’s intellectual capital). They were neither former Trotskyists nor dissident Democrats; their brand of neoconservatism was an inherited stance rather than the result of a political evolution away from liberalism, and they shared with their elders a strong interventionist ideology based on the doctrines of hegemonism and democratic globalism and an admiration for Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Rupert Murdoch, and Tony Blair. Their contributions to Commentary and The Weekly Standard and membership in influential political think tanks including the Hudson Institute, The Project for a New American Century, and the Project on Transitional Democracy honed the political rhetoric of the two decades preceding 9/11, with buzzwords such as unilateralism, regime change, and Islamofascism. As public intellectuals and activists, they played a significant role in the shaping of the Bush doctrine, although they were not the only foreign policy players in the administration, but their influence might have been greatly exaggerated by some of their critics and by those leading voices in the movement who were eager to reject all responsibility for the subsequent disastrous handling of the Iraq war. A frustrated Richard Perle testily declared in an interview at the end of George W. Bush’s second term that “huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: they were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of

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the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that”(cited in Rose 2007). Several key members of the administration from 2001 to 2005 did not belong to the neoconservative group: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, of course, and the president himself, as mentioned earlier, were opposed to “regime change” until 9/11. While Bush’s religiosity and personality (single-mindedness, care for the judgment of history) accounted in large part for the strong interventionist flavour of his first term, his political pragmatism explained the move away from the “freedom agenda” after 2004 once the failure of nation-building in Iraq became too glaring to ignore. WERE THE NEOCONSERVATIVES NEO - JACOBINS ?

If the Founding Fathers of neoconservatism had repudiated the Soviet Revolution, described by generations on the right as a repetition of the French Revolutionary Terror, how could their third-generation successors, born in traditional elite conservative families, be labelled as (neo)Jacobins? Ryn credited Leo Strauss’s political philosophy for having infected the neo-Jacobins with the messianic universalism of the Napoleonic era, while Fukuyama disagreed, noting that Strauss was at odds with the French revolutionaries’ abstract rationalism: “If there is any central theme to Strauss’s skepticism about the modern Enlightenment project, it is the idea that reason alone is sufficient to establish a durable political order or that the nonrational claims of revelation can be banished from politics” (Fukuyama 2006, 30). As previously mentioned, the neoconservative critique of Johnson’s “Great Society” was based on a profound hostility to social engineering and political voluntarism. Fukuyama contended that “if there is a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques carried out by those who wrote for The Public Interest [the neoconservative journal founded by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell], it is the limits of social engineering. Ambitious efforts to seek social justice, these writers argued, often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted organic social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (such as an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare)” (19). That was precisely the lesson the postwar disillusioned Leftists had drawn from their opposition to Stalinism: the best intentions of nineteenth-century progressive idealism and

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revolutionary romanticism had turned into the Gulag. “There was thus a direct link,” Fukuyama wrote, “between the critique of American public policy and the earlier anticommunism of the CCNY group: both American liberals and Soviet communists sought worthy ends but undermined themselves by failing to recognize the limits of political voluntarism” (19). Fukuyama added that the crusading democratic idealism of Ryn’s “neo-Jacobins” was also profoundly at odds with Strauss’s philosophy of history. “There is no Straussian belief in the universality of the American experience; neither Strauss nor any of the ancient political philosophers believed that democracy was the default regime to which societies would revert once dictatorship was removed” (31). A Tocquevillean faith in the long-term historical trend toward democracy did not imply that regime change would automatically bring about democratic institutions under all circumstances. For Fukuyama, the architects of the Bush doctrine were not neoconservative because 1) they confused the historical democratization of the modern world with “the belief that a stable democracy can be established at a given time and place” (31) and 2) they relied on the power of the state to bring about social and political change at home and abroad. Fukuyama’s central argument was that the interventionist foreign policy advocated by a new generation of ideologues such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan in The Weekly Standard throughout the 1990s had led to a profound redescription of the neoconservative agenda that departed in significant ways from the first generation’s political creed. Vaïsse concurred with Fukuyama, noting that “regime change would have seemed absurd to the first neoconservatives who were not interested in foreign policy. They focused their attention to cultural factors in terms of the consequences of statist social policy. Ideology was the enemy” (Vaïsse 2011, 9). The declarations of several representatives of the first generation after the fall of the Soviet Union bears out Fukuyama and Vaïsse’s position. Irving Kristol, for example, strongly opposed a US intervention in Liberia to end the civil war and an increasing humanitarian disaster in the summer of 2003: “What am I supposed to feel and think? If the Soviets (or the Chinese or even the Cubans) were involved, I would know what to think, since we would then be confronting a challenge. But this is a purely internal Liberian matter, and while I am saddened by the

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sufferings of the Liberian people caught up in this conflict, I see no reason why Liberia today should even be within the purview of American foreign policy – or why the Times should be devoting so much space to it. There are many other examples that can be given, but they all add up to one conclusion: with the end of the Cold War, an era of American foreign policy has come to a close. We won that war. ‘Global containment’ of communism did work – far better, indeed, than we anticipated” (cited in Vaïsse 2011, 222). Kristol did not mention Iraq in relation to his comments on “Operation Sheltering Sky” in western Africa. If communism only could pose a real challenge to the United States, which was no longer the case since the politics of global containment had worked, then alQaeda and Saddam Hussein did not represent a sufficient threat to American interests to justify a military intervention. The second part of his statement targeted a “relatively small group” of foreign policy experts whose members remain unnamed but clearly did not represent the kind of neoconservatism advocated by Kristol himself during the Cold War: “The only innovative trend in our foreign-policy thinking at the moment derives from a relatively small group, consisting of both liberals and conservatives, who believe there is an ‘American mission’ to actively promote democracy all over the world. This is a superficially attractive idea, but it takes only a few moments of thought to realize how empty of substance (and how full of presumption!) it is. In the entire history of the U.S., we have successfully ‘exported’ our democratic institutions to only two nations – Japan and Germany, after war and an occupation. We have failed to establish a viable democracy in the Philippines, or in Panama, or anywhere in Central America” (cited in Vaïsse 2011, 222). The targets of Irving Kristol’s criticism, sometimes called neoReaganites, could no longer represent neoconservative thinking, since the latter had lost its raison d’être with the demise of its old enemy, the Soviet Union. Kristol argued that “[it] was a generational phenomenon, and has now been pretty much absorbed into a larger, more comprehensive conservatism,” while Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that the term had “lost its meaning as commentators applied it beyond its original application to strongly anti-communist leftists”

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(Kristol and Brooks 1997, 200). Fukuyama, for his part, stopped short of rejecting the third-generation “[Bill, not Irving] Kristol-Kagan agenda” outright for fear of throwing the neoconservative baby out with the bathwater of the Bush administration’s failed policy in Iraq. The advisors’ “mistakes” were not the results of deep flaws in neoconservative thinking per se but rather of “biased judgment” on the part of individuals who had “interpreted” the neoconservative legacy in ways “that can be better described as mindsets or worldviews rather than principled positions” (Fukuyama 2006, 5). Although Fukuyama never used the term neo-Jacobin, his account of the values and beliefs underlying the Bush administration’s foreign policy dovetailed with a good part of Ryn’s analysis. What are we to make of Ryn’s and Fukuyama’s respective deconstructions of third-wave neoconservatism? Although both authors largely agreed on the diagnosis (the war in Iraq was a mistake), they differed significantly in their assessment of the intellectual origins of the foreign policy decisions made by the president and his advisors. Ryn’s narrative saw neoconservatives as the direct heirs to French Jacobinism (the former label a misnomer, since the Jacobins were revolutionaries, not conservatives), while Fukuyama’s account separated the Bush agenda from the authentic neoconservative legacy (whose origin was indeed in the socialist tradition). Ryn had set up a kind of shadow theatre: his neo-Jacobins were not truly Jacobins, at least in the narrow, historical meaning of the word, i.e., members of the Club des Jacobins in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Neither were they, according to Fukuyama, neoconservatives of the Cold War period. If they could be more accurately described as neo-Bonapartists, then Ryn would have a point, to the extent that Bonapartism included important elements of the Jacobin legacy broadly defined: administrative centralization, Enlightenment universalism, the abstract rationalism that formed the basis for the Napoleonic Code, imperial meritocracy as defined by professional competence rather than birth, and the development of scientific education in public schools. It is both ironic and predictable that both the proponents and the opponents of the Iraq war would use France as a foil for their respective positions. On the one hand, Ryn and other anti-war conservatives, whether of the realist “Hamiltonian” Kissinger wing (Brent Snowcroft, James Baker, Colin Powell) or of the isolationist “Jacksonian” persuasion (Pat Buchanan), shared the 200-year-old association between French radicalism and political tyranny stigmatized by

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Burke. On the other hand, those ideologues Ryn called the neoJacobins railed against the Chirac administration’s opposition to their agenda as a product of the Gaullist nationalistic and statist tradition described by many scholars as ... Bonapartist. Robert Kagan tried to assuage his compatriots’ uneasiness with being labelled an arrogant people by the rest of the world with a direct allusion to France as a nation that never had a problem with condescension: “America may be arrogant; Americans may at times be selfish; they may occasionally be ham-handed in their exercise of power,” he wrote. “But, excusez-moi, compared with whom? Can anyone believe that were France to possess the power the United States now has, the French would be less arrogant, less selfish, and less prone to making mistakes? Little in France’s history as a great power, or even as a medium power, justifies such optimism” (Kagan 1998). Note the ironic use of “excusez-moi”: whatever cause you champion, painting your opponents with the broad brush of a Gallic sense of self-importance is a sure way to discredit them through guilt by association. Depending on the issue at hand, France has provided ample material for foreign and domestic policy debates in America, from its tradition of centralizing illiberalism to a self-destructive belief in redistributive socialism and from an inflated sense of importance as a counterweight to the United States to intellectualist snobbery. The French are routinely faulted for being both levellers and elitists, egalitarian to a fault and yet self-absorbed individualists, progressive rationalists in politics, and backward-looking traditionalists in matters of cultural taste. What the transatlantic debate over Iraq once again demonstrated is that any unsavoury trait of this national character can serve opposite ends of the argument with an equal chance of success. The ideological use of the French difference by American proponents and opponents of the war in Iraq was often based on a form of cultural essentialism. It presupposed that never the twain shall meet, that things French are always incompatible with American ways and vice versa. And yet, alignment with aspects of neoconservatism in the United States led a group of French public intellectuals and geostrategic experts, the self-styled “anti-anti-Americans” to support military engagement in Southwest Asia in the aftermath of 9/11. Their story is told in the next chapter.

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4 The Anti-Anti Americans

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer for the New Yorker based in Paris and a frequent commentator on French culture and politics, wrote a piece in early September 2003 on the state of public opinion after the US invasion of Iraq. The essay was titled “The Anti-Anti-Americans: A Summer of Obsessions in France” and included interviews with André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had just published a book on the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl by Islamists in Pakistan. One of the most striking features of Gopnik’s chronicle of that summer in Paris, which combined a heat wave, strikes by part-time actors and musicians, and art exhibitions, was the conspicuous absence of any ill will toward American visitors or residents a few months after the French government’s fierce, and vain, objection to the war in Iraq. As the journalist put it, “with the egocentrism that is our national character (and which we call “innocence” and others “arrogance”), Americans in Paris were full of apprehension about their welcome ... Nothing remotely like the overtly poisonous anti-French propaganda of the Murdoch media could be found anywhere in Paris ... Even the Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, every day announced how much France likes America, insisting that only Iraq divides us” (Gopnik 2003).1 Gopnik did acknowledge that “a kind of generalized anti-Americanism” (as distinct from a simple opposition to the war) still existed in Paris, “though of course it has life as a muttered feeling, has almost no life as an idea or an argument,” having become, in the words of Philippe Roger cited in the article, “a routine of resentment, a passionless Pavlovianism.” According to Gopnik, far more lucid and arresting and just as likely to sell books and get attention was the

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alternative position, “the views of the anti-anti-Americans – that small but loud bunch of philosophers and journalists who share the American conviction that September 11th was an epoch-marking event, and that how open societies react to it will help determine how open they get to remain.” As distinct from those predictable critics of the United States à la Todd,2 “whose arguments had become boringly routinized with time,” the anti-anti-Americans, although “they can be counted on the fingers of one hand (with room left over for a thumb and a pinkie)” were interesting and original and “in a way the most potent of contemporary French thinkers.” Gopnik argued that Lévy had reached the stature of a Mailer and a Malraux, a rare kind of writer “addicted to the first person ... whose insistent ‘I’s’ somehow become an extended and inclusive ‘we,’ and who, through sheer lack of embarrassment about their own self-dramatization, end up enacting the dream life of their generation.” It is not entirely clear why the summer of anti-anti-Americanism was suddenly so exciting, since the opposite view was deemed to have almost entirely disappeared, at least “as an idea or an argument.” Either unfair denigration of US foreign policy was rampant, in which case those who supported the war in Iraq, given the fact that they were so few in numbers, stood no chance of being heard, or antiAmericanism had no longer any bite (even for de Villepin), and then in what way was Lévy’s or Glucksmann’s position either unusual or even necessary? In his attempt to construct a typology of transatlantic relations after 9/11, Gopnik argued that since traditional apologists of the United States, like Jean-François Revel, had transferred to the sole superpower a nationalism increasingly difficult to justify in their own country, thinkers like Lévy and Glucksmann were “forced to define a new kind of international liberalism ... because they have to defend American behavior without being in any way American nationalists.” Two salient features emerged from the public intellectuals featured in the New Yorker piece: they had little respect for George W. Bush, and they believed that the French opposition to the war came from something deeper than a simple dislike of the superpower across the Atlantic. Anti-anti-Americanism was not proAmericanism, not unconditional support of the United States (as though such a thing had ever existed in France, even among ColdWar Atlanticists), but rejection of “the passionless Pavlovianism” of those for whom America could do no right and always lost what Richard Rorty once called “the America Sucks Sweepstakes.” As a

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double negative, anti-anti-Americanism had everything to do with France, not the United States. Lévy acknowledged that he was indeed an “anti-anti-American” (did he come up with the term or simply endorse it?), while stating once again his opposition to the invasion of Iraq because the true target of the war against extremists should be Pakistan. Lévy’s position is worth quoting at length, given Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan and the fact that bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan until his death in 2011: “I am solidly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I’d seen in Pakistan. Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher – an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical – he’s just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon.” The use of the collective “we” in “we were attacking Iraq” was somewhat puzzling. It could not refer to France, since Chirac’s administration had opposed the war. Was it the “coalition of the willing” assembled by the US, from which France had so spectacularly excluded itself? Or all the cosmopolitan proponents of what Gopnik called “liberal internationalism,” regardless of their own government’s position? Glucksmann deplored that the justification for waging war had been “the absurd argument about weapons of mass destruction” instead of a case made on pure humanitarian grounds. “I know it would have worked in France,” he argued, “People really did learn something from Bosnia, and had the case been made resolutely that we had another Milosevic it would have worked ... No completely defensible cause has ever been so poorly defended as this one.” Gopnik noted that the US president had become an embarrassment and a liability for those who would have supported the war either on realist or humanitarian grounds: “Even the most resolutely anti-anti-Americans in Paris don’t know what to do about George W. Bush – no one since Joseph McCarthy has been such a gift to anti-Americanism in Europe,

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and particularly in France ... The centrist journal Le Débat, in an editorial defending the American intervention in Iraq and criticizing the French government for opposing it, felt compelled to call the current administration ‘perhaps the worst in American history.’” Both Lévy and Glucksmann confirmed Gopnik’s view that the French disagreement with the Bush doctrine was not really the result of the routinized resentment of the United States (although the New Yorker correspondent had acknowledged the persistence of “antiAmericanism in Europe, particularly in France”). For Lévy, “the French opposition to the war was opportunist in part, rational in part, but mostly rooted in a desire not to know. What dominates France is not the presence of some anti-Americanism but an enormous absence – the absence of any belief aside from a handful of corporatist reflexes. This whole business with les intermittents [the freelance, impermanently employed actors and musicians whose strike that summer made the headlines in the media] is typical: it is corporatism pursued to the point of professional suicide. All that we have to replace it with is the idea of Europe; so far, we have overcome romantic nationalism, but we have nothing left to replace it with.” Glucksmann also made the poor part-time show-business employees (known as les intermittents du spectacle), who had no idea that they were part and parcel of France’s slide into chaos, the target of his disenchanted assessment of the sorry state of the country, going as far as to equate their attitude to that of jihadists: “There is a kind of nihilism at large in the world now, which ranges from the murderous nihilism of the terrorists to the comic, domestic nihilism of les intermittents, who have only the power to block, to destroy, and they use it.” As discussed in chapter 1, “nihilism” had been Glucksmann’s main explanatory model for the metaphysics of 9/11 in his Dostoïevski à Manhattan published the year before. The melancholy diagnosis of national decadence echoed the French neoliberal critique of the backward-looking, anti-modernist stance of those who kept resisting the inevitable and salutary advent of globalization. Gopnik put his own pessimistic stamp on this collective “retreat into the past, not to reject modernity, but to pretend it is not happening.” “The real threat to France,” he wrote, “is not anti-Americanism, which might at least have the dignity of an argument, an idea, and could at least provoke a grownup response, but what the writer Philippe Sollers has called the creeping ‘moldiness’ of French life – the will to defiantly turn the country back into an enclosed provincial culture.”

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The protagonists of Gopnik’s summer chronicle were hardly newcomers to the Parisian world of literati. Thirty years earlier, Lévy, Glucksmann, and Sollers had been involved in various capacities in la nouvelle philosophie, one of the most contentious chapters in the French life of ideas after 1968. The tale is worth retelling briefly, given the striking similarities between a number of the participants in the post 9/11 ideological battles in France and the first generation of American neocons. In 1976, a group of Young Turks burst onto the intellectual scene. Successfully self-promoting in the cultural media as “the new philosophers,” they launched a virulent critique of the legacies of Marxism, Stalinism, and fascism, repudiating their former activism on the radical left (many of them had been members of Maoist organizations a decade earlier). Their books combined polemical readings of the “Master Thinkers” who had paved the way to the Gulag (Marx, Hegel) and the Holocaust (Nietzsche, Heidegger) with lyrical digressions on religion, spirituality, and even mysticism as sites of struggle against totalitarian oppression. They had been influenced in their formative years by the teachings of poststructuralist theorists such as Lacan, Althusser, Barthes, Kristeva, and Foucault (Christofferson 2004). They ended up rejecting their earlier association with what came to be known as la pensée 68 and la French Theory, a constellation of philosophical views that undermined various aspects of Western metaphysics. Rapidly securing key positions in the media and the publishing industry, the former sixties radicals continued to exert a powerful influence throughout the eighties and nineties, gradually moving to the right as the threat of global jihad increased. The nouveaux philosophes, like all convenient, but often misleading, labels meant to group various individuals within an artistic movement or a philosophical school (Romantics, Realists, Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, Futurists, Situationists, Poststructuralists, PostMarxists, etc.), included authors who were associated with the movement in the media but denied being part of it. I will focus on those representatives of what was admittedly an evolving ideological nebula who more closely resembled American neoconservatives, both as antitotalitarians hailing from the left and as supporters, in different ways and to a different extent, of US foreign policy after 9/11.

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VARIETIES OF FRENCH NEOCONSERVATISM

Before examining the possible connections between the French antianti-Americans and neoconservatives in the US, it is important to clarify the various meanings of “neoconservatism” in the French context. In recent years, a number of books have used the term to describe movements of ideas either unrelated to, or much wider than, views expressed by the partisans of military-backed regime change in the post-9/11 context. Christine Fauré, for example, has included les nouveaux philosophes (especially Lévy and Glucksmann) in a larger group she called les néo-conservateurs à la française, but she reserved most of her analysis to the “revisionist” historians of the French Revolution, François Furet and Mona Ozouf, as well as opponents of sixties poststructuralism such as Marcel Gauchet and Luc Ferry (Fauré 2015). Fauré focused on a 1980s “neoliberal” turn based on a revival of the works of Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville, and Raymond Aron championed by the influential scholarly journal Le Débat. These developments predate 9/11, and though not unrelated to intellectual trends in the United States, including the critique of “political correctness” in the 1990s, they are not the kind of neoconservatism I will be discussing in the remainder of this chapter. Neither is the kind of ideological stance described in Philippe Corcuff’s 2014 book Les années trente reviennent et la gauche est dans le brouillard (The Thirties Are Back and the Left Is in a Fog), which took as his starting point the pervasive cliché comparing the current rise of national-populism in Europe and the United States to the interwar “conservative revolution.” “Just like in France today,” Corcuff wrote, “conservatism [in the thirties] did not present itself as some laid-back defense of the established order, a simple call for the conservation of what existed. On the contrary, it meant to be ‘revolutionary,’ at war with the establishment” (Corcuff 2014, 25). The point “was to recover and restore through radical change a number of values, institutions and forms of sociability that had been lost, or were in crisis. The ‘conservative revolutionaries’ of the time were center stage in the critique of the social order. To underline these similarities, I would talk of neoconservatism in France today rather than simply of conservatism in the usual sense” (25–6). Corcuff’s targets were a number of public intellectuals and TV personalities such as Alain Soral, Eric Zemmour, and Elizabeth Lévy whose books, blogs, websites, and televised inter-

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ventions were fertile ground for what the author called a “xenophobic, sexist, homophobic and nationalistic ‘post-fascism’” widely disseminated on social media and relayed by political parties such as the Rassemblement National (formerly known as the National Front). Corcuff’s neoconservatives share with members of the American alt-right a long list of ideological bugaboos, including multiculturalism, political correctness, urban bobos (bourgeois-bohemians) and their libertine morals, internationalists, the “grand remplacement” (great replacement) of native French people by non-white refugees and immigrants, not to mention a plethora of conspiracies, from the Nuremberg trials and the assassination of John Kennedy to September 11, all emanating from what Alain Soral has called the “AmericanZionist and Judeo-Protestant imperial domination” (48). Political philosopher Juliette Grange’s Les néoconservateurs (2017) examined a much larger intellectual and political configuration than Fauré and even Corcuff, who focused their attention on a restricted circle of scholars and media personalities. In her extremely detailed and well-documented study, the author defined neoconservatism as a particular variety of right-wing extremism combining economic neoliberalism and a return to moral and religious values, with considerable populist, anti-modernist, anti-individualist, and conspiratorial components. She describes the movement as having taken root in France in the previous two decades, involving think tanks, lobbyists, faith organizations, and academic circles inspired by similar developments in the United States. Solidly implanted among conservative Catholics, it played a major role in sexual politics, mobilizing a vigorous rejection of gay marriage, medically assisted procreation, and gender theory made in America. Although Grange devoted a few pages to the Cold-War neoconservatives, she aptly distinguished them from the right-wing populists and libertarians who rose to prominence in the Republican Party during the Obama years: “The first generation of neoconservatives is often made up of former left-wing militants from the sixties and seventies and intellectuals who had disavowed the ideals of modern political liberalism ... Converted in later life, generally well educated, they were at the beginning rather removed from what became from 2010 on the populism of the Tea Party” (Grange 2017, 60). On the contrary, the antianti-Americans favoured global democracy and human rights and showed very little appetite for the kind of reactionary “theoconservatism” described by Grange on both sides of the Atlantic. If anything,

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the mixture of political liberalism, humanitarian military intervention, and supranational institutions made them the favourite targets of Corcuff’s “post-fascist,” national-populist ideologues. The current use of the term neoconservative in reference to distinct and often opposite segments of the French Right, from Atlanticists and sovereigntists to Catholic conservatives and ethno-nationalists, attests to the fluid recomposition (reshaping) of the country’s political landscape, culminating in the electoral defeat of a deeply divided Left in the first round of the 2017 presidential election. WERE THE ANTI - ANTI - AMERICANS NEOCONSERVATIVES ?

As already mentioned, there are noticeable similarities between Gopnik’s anti-anti-Americans and the founding fathers of American neoconservatism, despite the generational difference (the original neocons were born in the 1920s and the former nouveaux philosophes two decades later). Both cohorts met as students in selective higher education institutions such as CCNY or the École Normale Supérieure and joined Marxist revolutionary organizations in their youth (Maoists rather than Troskyists in France but staunchly anti-Stalinist in both cases), only to translate their disillusionment with revolutionary utopias into a relentless denunciation of totalitarianism in all its forms. Members of both groups secured careers in academia and co-founded new journals and editorial series in major publishing houses in order to relay their newfound awareness of the horrors of “actually existing socialism,” attract a substantial readership, and obtain key positions in the publishing world and the media. Norman Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol launched Public Interest in 1965, and Irving’s son William founded The Weekly Standard thirty years later. On the French side, Bernard-Henri Lévy’s editorship in the prestigious Éditions Grasset helped to bring the somewhat confidential publications of the new philosophers to a wider audience. The most influential among these disillusioned leftists gained access to the op-ed pages of the mainstream media, Lévy in Le Point, Bruckner in Le Nouvel Observateur, and Adler in Le Monde and Le Figaro. André Glucksmann and Pascal Bruckner became major contributors to Le Meilleur des mondes, a review launched in 2004 to support the war against terror and denounce anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism in France. Their ultimate goal as self-styled Counsels to the Prince was to

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influence their respective national debates by securing prestigious positions in think tanks, clubs, and universities and sitting on policymaking bodies such as the Council on Foreign Relations in the US and the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique in France. Francis Fukuyama noted in America at the Crossroads that all the members of the original neoconservative galaxy did not move to the right at the same pace and to the same extent: “While virtually all the CCNY group had ceased being Marxist by the time of World War II, the timing and the distance of their eventual shift to the right varied: Irving Kristol moved the farthest, Irving Howe the least, and Bell, Glazer, Lipset, and Moynihan ended up somewhere in between” (Fukuyama 2006, 17). The same is true of the former French radicals: Alexandre Adler moved the farthest to the right, while Bernard-Henri Lévy never really broke up with the reformist social-liberal Left, voting for the socialist candidate in the 2007 and 2012 presidential elections, calling Hollande “a good President,” and supporting his reelection attempt in 2017 (Hollande eventually decided not to run). Adler’s slide to the right (he was a Maoist in his youth and later a member of the French Communist Party) is evidenced by the various newspapers and magazines to which he successively contributed, from the radical Libération (founded by Sartre, among others, in the aftermath of May 1968), to the leftist Le Matin de Paris, to the left-ofcenter Le Monde (which he left in 2002 following political disagreements with the editorial line), to centre-right L’Express, to the conservative Le Point and Le Figaro. André Glucksmann, briefly a member of La Gauche prolétarienne, a Marxist-Leninist organization, before gradually moving to the right as well, ended up supporting Nicolas Sarkozy in the early 2000s before publicly voicing his disappointment with the president. While Glucksmann, Bruckner, and Adler backed the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and later supported Sarkozy, whose stance toward US foreign policy was in sharp contrast to that of his predecessor Jacques Chirac, Lévy did neither, although he acknowledged (there lies the nuance) the validity of the Iraq war “in principle,” i.e., as the justified toppling of a tyrannical regime. The first three later distanced themselves from the Bush administration’s conduct of the war (especially after Abu Ghraib), just as Fukuyama and many other neoconservatives did at the time. Adler supported the election of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 but threw his lot with Obama in 2008. Both Lévy and Glucksmann criticized Huntington’s clash of civ-

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ilizations thesis, and Lévy never espoused Adler’s robust anticommunitarian and anti-Islamist views. “BHL,” as Lévy is known in France, voiced his disagreements with some of the leading figures of third-wave neoconservatism. In his 2007 book American Vertigo (for which he was hailed as a modern-day Tocqueville), he related several conversations with Richard Perle, William Kristol, and Francis Fukuyama. The first two accounts reveal the profound ambiguity with which he viewed the motives behind Perle and Kristol’s politics. Regarding Perle, Lévy noted that “sometimes, listening to this Bush follower who has, among other peculiarities, remained a Democrat and boasts about it, I say to myself, of course he’s right. How can one be against the overthrow of such a tyrant [as Saddam Hussein]? How can one spend a lifetime, as I have done, deploring the inaction of rich countries, their pusillanimity, their recurrent Munichism ... and not be delighted when in the most powerful democracy in the world there finally appears a generation of intellectuals who arrive close to the top and can concretely work for the universalization of human rights and freedom?” (Lévy 2007, 190). Lévy found himself at odds with Perle, “an outraged old conservative,” whose uncompromising arrogance, deep contempt for political opponents, and haughty dismissal of those who hope for a negotiated solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict belied the commonalities between the two men.“But then, at other times, I catch a word, an intonation, an offhand phrase, implying that the actual presence or absence in Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction isn’t so important after all. Or I hear a dismissal of people who, like me, recoil from the idea of a preventive war ... Or I hear something that I interpret as a condemnation of this Geneva road map advocating a division of land between Israeli and Palestinians, which I ardently support ... Or I hear an unfair phrase about [Presidential candidate John] Kerry or his wife. So, I swing over to the other side; I rear back internally; I tell myself that this man and I surely don’t belong to the same family” (190). The short passage on Kristol in American Vertigo is every bit as conflicted and ends with a rejection of the hard-nosed tactics of the neoconservative press. Despite their differences on “positions,” Lévy claimed that they both shared “axioms” and “premises” (a distinction reminiscent of Fukuyama), a common “intellectual biography”: “What links us: history, genealogy, a certain number of formative experiences, the oldest and perhaps most essential of which seems to be his long rebellion against the way the West has consented to the enslave-

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ment of the countries of ‘captive Europe.’” Unlike what had happened with Perle, a shared purpose, sensitivity, and experience seemed to bring the two men together: “When I hear Kristol talk about how his youth was formed by the great antitotalitarian thinkers of the twentieth century; when I see him get carried away about the cultural relativism and the historicism that were alibis for the most dreadful dictatorships; when I imagine him laying siege, as he did in the 1990s, to America’s foreign policy decision-makers in order to persuade them to intervene in Bosnia and then in Kosovo; and finally, when I imagine him pleading against the Taliban and, even more, against our silent assent to the iron rule it imposed on Afghanistan, it’s my own history I find: these are the dates of my own intellectual biography I see quickly pass by; I want to say that, though our positions diverge, our axioms are shared” (192). At odds with his interlocutor on the death penalty, Lévy disapproved of the way Kristol’s The Weekly Standard published an article “crammed with the vilest gossip about the private life” of Bill Clinton, mixing “politics with trash,” the kind of thing “a European can’t accept” (193). Lévy ended up disputing Kristol’s credentials as a neoconservative, echoing Fukuyama’s own bittersweet admission that the label attached to the father had been misappropriated by the son: “Bill Kristol is listening to me, but I sense I am not convincing him. And I feel that here I grasp, at least for now, the essence of what separates us. A neoconservative? No – he is a Platonist bereft of ideals. An adviser to princes without detachment or reservations. An antitotalitarian who, at bottom, and whatever he may say, hasn’t read enough Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Julien Benda – and who, not having done so, deprives himself of the necessary freedom that the status of intellectual induces in Europe” (193). Lévy’s brief tutorial in the proper way of reading political philosophy smacked of the moral and interpretive superiority of the old-world intellectual that irritates so many Americans. The harsh judgments passed on Perle and Kristol showed that Lévy was closer to the first generation of neoconservatives than to the third. He shared with American Cold-War liberals such as Sidney Hook or Scoop Jackson a mixture of social and cultural progressivism and fierce anticommunism, renamed “anti-totalitarianism” in the context of the 1970s and 1980s. This tension might explain Lévy’s conflicted relationship with both of his interlocutors. On the one hand, as a liberal anti-communist, he was sympathetic to their intervention-

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ism, their crusading spirit in the cause of freedom; on the other, as a supporter of a two-state solution in Palestine, he bristled at their sabre-rattling, hatred of the liberal press and liberal democrats, and the customary allergy of conservatives to cultural change. FROM EDITORIALS TO PETITIONS : LE CERCLE DE L’ ORATOIRE

The anti-anti-Americans shared with their neoconservative counterparts a jaundiced view of France’s narcissistic return to a fantasized past, as well as a somewhat moralistic conception of the United States as a benevolent hegemon whose mission was to combat tyranny wherever possible and without French support if necessary. And yet, many of them steadfastly refuted the accusation of neoconservatism directed at them by their opponents. A brief study of one of the major pro-war publications, Le Meilleur des mondes, might help to settle the case. The review was the creation of a group of academics, essayists, and journalists associated with Le Cercle de l’Oratoire, a think tank formed as an immediate response to 9/11. The group derived its name from its original meeting place, a room in the Reformed Church Temple of the Oratoire du Louvre in Paris (the wife of one of the founders, journalist Michel Taubmann, was one of the pastors). On 8 November 2001, following a well-worn ritual in French intellectual life, the group signed in Le Monde a petition approving the war in Afghanistan and expressing the fundamentals of what would become the new post-9/11 Atlantic alliance. The title of the piece, “This War Is Ours,” was a direct response to a manifesto published a few days earlier in the same venue, entitled “This War Is Not Ours” and signed by personalities close to the French Communist Party and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organization.3 The Oratoire signatories explicitly linked the title and content of the rival petition to an event from World War II, a strategy of historical contextualization that would be used again and again in the aftermath of 9/11. The reference in this case was to the German-Soviet pact of 1939 and the subsequent refusal by French communists to take sides in what they saw as a struggle between British and German imperialisms. The reversed symmetry of the two lists of signatories suggested that for the members of Le Cercle de l’Oratoire there were only two camps, freedom and tyranny, and not three, Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union as the French communists had argued in

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1939. The current choice was between democracy and terror, in keeping with George W. Bush’s well-known statement that those who were not on the side of the United States were against it. Taking to task Italian philosopher Toni Negri for the “revolutionary defeatism” implied in his refusal to choose between two evils, “the dollar talibans” and the “oil talibans,” the Oratoire petition underscored the legitimacy of the war as “an act of self-defense,” the need to “support the soldiers who defend our liberties and our security” and to work for the victory of the British and the Americans,” which is “our victory.” The dozen signatories included several historians and political scientists, many of them former radicals who had published extensively on Soviet and Chinese communism, which opened up another historical connection, this time to Cold-War neoconservatism. Both the World War II and Cold-War references helped to frame the Taliban, alQaeda, Hezbollah, the Iranian Mollahs, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “fascislamistes” (Islamofascists). As the star of bin Laden and al-Qaeda gradually paled, Iran emerged as the most credible threat to democracy in the Muslim world, the nation of 75 million being a more likely candidate to replace Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union than a nebulous, unstructured network of stateless jihadists. One could say of many Oratoriens what Francis Fukuyama had said of the first generation of American neoconservatives: their views expressed the disillusionment of the anti-communist Left, and some of the signatories’ youthful far-left militancy and subsequent dedication to scholarly anti-communism did indeed resemble their American counterparts’ political apostasy. Michel Taubmann, a former Trotskyist and a journalist on the FrenchGerman high cultural television channel Arte, had devoted a book (1994) to a communist World War II résistant whom the party had repeatedly tried to eliminate. He later wrote two studies on the Iranian revolution, including a biography of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad published in 2008. Stéphane Courtois, a former Maoist (1967–71), was a historian of the Komintern and the editor of Le Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism), a controversial study comparing the crimes of communism with those of Nazism. The book sparked a heated debate among historians, notably regarding the actual number of victims of the Shoa and the Soviet Gulag. Pierre Rigoulot, a member of a small Maoist group (Fédération des cercles marxistes-léninistes de France) from 1964 to 1967, was the author of several books on French communism, North Korea, the Iraqi war, and

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anti-Americanism and had contributed to Courtois’s Livre noir. Jacques and Claudie Broyelle’s names also appeared on the list of supporters: after having renounced Maoism, they had written several essays denouncing the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese Gulag in the1970s.4 As the Bush administration was preparing to attack Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, many of the signatories of the 2001 petition took aim at the first (and largest ever) worldwide anti-war demonstration in France in another petition, published this time in the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, a sign that support for US foreign policy was now limited to conservative circles, since President Chirac’s centre-right government was now actively opposing the war after supporting the US intervention in Afghanistan two years before. The petitioners’ rationale included the powerlessness of pacifists, support for the Iraqi people oppressed by a ruthless dictator, a lack of confidence in Saddam Hussein’s denial of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in his country, and a belief that a more democratic Iraq would have a positive effect on the unstable economic and political situation in the Middle East.5 The last point, of course, was one of the major arguments put forward by American neoconservatives to legitimize regime change in Iraq, in reference to the democratization of German and Japanese societies and the construction of a peaceful, united western Europe under American leadership after 1945. The statement in Le Figaro listed the names of twenty signatories, and many of them had endorsed a petition about Afghanistan two years earlier (which numbered more than fifty names). A third petition, dated 4 April 2003, two weeks after the start of the war, went one step further. It not only questioned the validity and legitimacy of anti-war demonstrations but openly endorsed the US administration’s evil vs freedom narrative, siding with Washington and London in open disagreement with the French position. The text repeated the salient points of the case for “shock and awe,” the number of countries making up “the coalition of the willing,” and the fact that the benefits of democracy should not be reserved for the West. Although the signatories wished the crisis had been solved through the United Nations, refused to “deliver a blank check to the Bush administration,” and hoped that the future of Iraq “will belong as soon as possible to its people in the form of a federal state,” they once again condemned, as they had two years before, any amalgamation between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, stressing the fact that

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“Britain and the United States were two of the oldest democracies in the world.”6 This time, more than seventy people endorsed the statement, including major figures of the antitotalitarian movement, from the prominent Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky to Pierre-André Taguieff and Pascal Bruckner.7 The growing impact and visibility of the Cercle de l’Oratoire led to the launching of Le Meilleur des mondes, a journal that would publicize the group’s ideas with the backing of public intellectuals, journalists, and academics who had supported the Cercle’s initiatives since 9/11 through editorials, petitions, and public lectures. READING LE MEILLEUR DES MONDES

The first issue appeared in the spring of 2006, and the editorial clarified both the journal’s title and the context in which its founders and contributors had felt compelled to broaden their public stance. The review’s name was obviously a reference to Aldous Huxley (Le Meilleur des mondes is the French translation of the title Brave New World), and its agenda was presented in the editorial of the first issue as “an attempt to formulate the ambition and modesty” of the new publication, described as “anti-utopian, against all the imposed brave new worlds, listening for the best of all possible worlds – the only one there is.” The main reason given for the new venture was the deep intellectual dead-end prevalent both in France and abroad halfway through the post-9/11 decade: “This journal was born of the boredom, solitude, and growing malaise of some of us as we witness the state of public life in France, which seems to find pleasure in rehashing wornout intellectual myths and powerless political rancors.” This depressed diagnosis echoed the disenchanted remarks of Lévy and Glucksmann on the state of French politics in Adam Gopnik’s 2003 New Yorker article. The editorial contextualized the creation of the journal by mentioning the unexpected outcome of the previous presidential contest. In April 2002, to everyone’s surprise, the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, had failed to qualify for the second round of the election. As a consequence, the final runoff opposed incumbent Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front. Chirac received more than 80 per cent of the vote because many electors on the Left preferred to support “a crook than a fascist,” to quote a slogan of the time.

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For Le Meilleur des mondes, the collapse of the traditional political system at home held important consequences on the international scene as well. The president used the mandate given him by both conservative and socialist voters to openly defy the sole superpower left after the end of the Cold War. Accused by their detractors of being foreign agents, the journal’s contributors responded that they did not advocate a pure and simple alignment with US foreign policy but a constructive cooperation aimed at correcting the least palatable elements of the Bush doctrine. In their view, France, once again, had missed an opportunity: “Far from playing the role of a demanding but loyal ally that would have counterbalanced George W. Bush’s unilateralism, France, right and left together, abandoned itself to the old demons that have led her, for a long time, to distrust any kind of change as long as it brings with it an expansion of American influence or of the market economy, as was the case to a lesser extent with the war in Afghanistan.” The French opposition to the invasion of Iraq was not the result of a rational assessment of the geopolitics of power but a symptom among others of the deep cultural and intellectual crisis of the country. While the world was changing, from innovative communication technologies to the rise of transnational jihad, “France, with tight fists and rage in her heart, watches powerlessly from the side of the road the train of globalization go by.” On 1 May 2003, the American president, sporting an air force jacket, proclaimed to the world the end of major combat operations in Iraq from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Three years later, many among the early partisans of the Bush agenda deplored the mismanagement of the war and the continued progress of Islamism in the Arab world and were equally distressed by the impossibility of ever turning France into a neoliberal democracy. “Under new names,” the editorial of the first issue argued, “altermondialisme on the one hand, souverainisme on the other, those corpses of the old ideologies of nationalism and communism, continue to sustain false divisions.” Liberalism still remained “the nemesis responsible for all the woes of the planet” as the country persisted in being hopelessly, incurably anti-capitalist and anti-democratic. The dream of the reformist antitotalitarian generation had foundered on the coalition of national-republicans, left and right, who had cheered for Chirac and Villepin. The rhetorical strategy of the anti-anti-Americans pointed to the ethnocentrism of much of the intellectual debate fol-

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lowing 9/11. Why not simply call themselves “pro-Americans”? Because the main quarrel of the journal’s founders and collaborators was with their opponents at home, with what was infuriatingly French about the resistance to American foreign policy. The reaction to the first issue of Le Meilleur des mondes was immediate. An article in Le Monde on 24 March 2006 described the newly minted journal as “a voice for America,” and the author argued that “the difficult birth of a French-style ‘neo-conservatism’ will have been one of the most original phenomena of the period of ideological reclassification opened up by the shock of September 11, 2001.”8 A few weeks later, journalist Eric Aeschimann wondered in Libération whether the partisans of the “just war” in Iraq were simply des néoconservateurs à la française. Hadn’t Michel Taubmann once said that “what we have in common with the neoconservatives is our common enemy: radical Islamism” and “the American question is important because it is a question asked of France”? The article also mentioned Bruno Tertrais, a geopolitical scientist who was a member of the Socialist party and of the Cercle de l’Oratoire, as evidence that the reformist left was far from immune from Washington’s nefarious influence.9 In the summer of 2008, Le Meilleur des mondes denied being a neoconservative venue once again, not because the label was anything to be ashamed of but because it did not reflect the diversity of opinions in its editorial committee. Some Oratoriens had become increasingly critical of the military occupation of Iraq, just as former neocons such as Francis Fukuyama and David Brooks had also distanced themselves from the label as early as 2006. Le Meilleur des mondes had come too late on the scene, when many early supporters of the United States had lost faith in its possible success, and the final issues of the review exuded a mixture of morose defeatism and resigned bitterness. The feeling was that the review had been unduly victimized by the “negative notoriety” given by unfair critics, which provided another opportunity to deplore a political culture in which “the antidemocratic intellectual remains a picturesque figure of our national patrimony, together with the Chartres cathedral and blue cheese.” In response to what they denounced as the systematic distortion of their positions, the Oratoriens indulged in some mudslinging of their own. The editorial of the fifth issue (Fall 2007) responded to attacks from the national-republican newspaper Marianne by ridiculing “the obsessive anti-Americanism of those ‘imbeciles’ who do not give a damn about Iraq and its people” and the strange bed-fellows alliance of “the lost

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soldiers formerly from [the conservative] Le Figaro and [the communist] L’Humanité who dip their bitter pen in the common inkwell of a left-reactionary populism.”10 The journal also denied being a Sarkozyste publication, pointing once again at the diversity of its contributors, some of them supporters of Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate and unsuccessful challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2007 presidential election. The presence of socialists among the Oratoriens was certainly no evidence that the neoconservative label was undeserved, given the fact that the American version had brought together centrist Democrats such as Richard Perle and neo-Reaganian conservatives like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. Le Meilleur des mondes did include an interview with the newly elected president in the summer of 2007 and endorsed his foreign policy agenda, which differed significantly from that of his predecessor, although both men belonged to the same party. Sarkozy proved to be as neoliberal as Chirac had been paleoGaullist, wasting no time in turning France’s relations with the Bush administration a good 180 degrees. By 2007, Gopnik’s anti-antiAmericans were no longer all on the same page. As previously mentioned, André Glucksmann came out in favour of Sarkozy while Lévy supported the Socialist candidate. On 19 April 2009, Glucksmann received the Legion of Honor, the most honorific of French distinctions, from the new president. The event raised many eyebrows in Parisian intellectual circles and figured prominently in Jean Birnbaum’s pamphlet Les Maoccidents: un néo-conservatisme à la française, a chronicle of the former student radicals’ shift “from the cult of the red Orient to the defense of the West.” Le Meilleur des mondes predictably found the new French administration’s agenda to be “globally congruent” with their own: détente with the United States and collaboration with Washington in the war on terror; criticism of the neo-colonial “African policy” (la Françafrique) initiated by de Gaulle and continued by both Mitterrand and Chirac; unqualified support of the European Union; rejection of the traditional “Arab policy” based on “complacency with corrupt regimes and severity toward Israel,” and severe questioning of the geopolitical status quo in order to set peoples free. The journal argued repeatedly that the proof that it was not neoconservative was that some of its contributors had disagreed with unilateralism from the start and supported a United Nations solution, while all of them later acknowledged that supporting the Bush administration had been a

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mistake. The first issue had featured a piece on “Leo Strauss and the Neoconservatives: Abandoning Conservatism,” which was not an unqualified praise of the doctrine, although the approach remained purely academic. The third installment (summer 2007) was more openly critical; it included an article entitled “Why the Neoconservatives Have Failed” by Nicole Bacharan, a transatlantic political scientist specializing in French-American relations and teaching both at Sciences Po-Paris and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Regularly featured in the French and American media, she had declared on the night of 9/11 that “tonight, we are all Americans,” a phrase borrowed (and made famous) by Jean-Marie Colombani’s editorial in Le Monde discussed in chapter 1 (Bacharan 2007, 14–17). Bacharan now disagreed with the exculpatory view that neoconservative thinking on Iraq was correct but had been undermined by the administration and its corporate affiliates’ mismanagement of the protectorate. Solely blaming the execution on the ground, she wrote, “is unfair: the absence of a plan for occupation and reconstruction corresponds to analytical mistakes inherent to the neoconservative project” (16). She went on to list the five major mistakes of the neocons in power: arrogance (“they did not listen to experts of the Arab world or reticent military brass”); the transposition to the Middle East of a model based on the “velvet revolutions” in eastern Europe (peaceful transition from communism to democracy); the fateful decision to send only 130,000 troops to Iraq; the a priori dismissal of American-led nation-building (the task of reconstruction should belong to the Iraqis); and hastiness in conducting the democratization process. The piece concluded that the neo-cons “had their moment” and that it was time for a new transatlantic model in which “France and Europe should act to strengthen the ties with their American cousin, extend a hand to the new dissidents and especially to Arab and Muslim intellectuals persecuted by those who kill in the name of their faith, and lay the foundations of a new Atlanticism” (17). Which was largely what Sarkozy had set out to do and might also explain why some anti-anti-Americans backed the Obama candidacy as providing an alternative to the failed policies of the Bush administration. While many neoconservatives resigned from the White House and resentfully blamed each other, their former French and European allies moved on, since their agenda was not tied to a specific administration or particular kind of foreign policy

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as long as it included military and diplomatic intervention in the name of democracy. The fifth issue (Fall 2007) reassured its readers that American power had a long future ahead of it, with or without the neocons at the helm. Bruno Tertrais, for example, noted with satisfaction, and perhaps some relief, the continuity of American foreign policy since World War II, regardless of the president in office or dominant party in Congress. After all, George H.W. Bush had first mentioned “a war on terrorism” in the eighties, Bill Clinton coined the phrase “diabolical axis” in 1998, and his advisers were talking about “rogue states” well before 9/11 (56). The good news was that the 2008 elections would not profoundly alter the course of US economic, scientific, and military leadership and that “the 21st century [would] still be (essentially) American” (57), ensuring that the agenda of Le Meilleur des mondes outlined in the editorial of spring 2007 would continue to be implemented. “The struggle that unites us transcends the divisions between right and left: against the resurgence of totalitarianism, notably via radical Islamism; for the alliance of democracies and the support of democratic regimes subjected to all the authoritarian regimes; and for the rule of law, secularism, equality between men and women, and the values of the Enlightenment we consider to be universal.”11 ATLANTICISM OLD AND NEW

The new Atlanticists resembled their Cold-War predecessors in that their support of the United States was largely strategic and many of them could be quite critical of American culture and society. In the fifties and sixties, pro-Americans saw the nuclear and conventional forces of la république impériale, as Raymond Aron would call the United States in 1972, as western Europe’s only defence against communism. Aron himself, despite his commitment in The Imperial Republic “to remain as impartial as possible” and “neither to justify nor condemn the United States” (xix–xx), suggested that American culture was not always free from irrational tendencies, especially of the religious kind. In the preface to the American edition of his book, Aron pinned his hopes on Nixon and Kissinger’s “foreign policy governed by reason” and on the fact that “the elected representatives of the American nation [were] swayed today by economic interests, both commercial and monetary, since public opinion does not cry out in

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fear of an enemy or call for a crusade against evil” (x), as had been the case in the heydays of McCarthyism. Aron’s post-9/11 liberal disciples shared similar hopes of a rational foreign policy in a new geopolitical context in which Islamism had replaced godless communism as the new enemy at the gates. The United States remained in their eyes the only country capable of advancing the antitotalitarian agenda, since a decadent, complacent Europe had become politically unwilling and militarily unable to effectively carry out the crusade for democracy. Because their view of America was mostly instrumental, however, they retained the right to warn about its excesses or criticize its failures, as when they denounced torture at Abu Ghraib, questioned the bigoted zeal of outraged old conservatives, or transferred their allegiance to Barack Obama in 2008. The instrumentalization of American power was visible in the anti-anti-Americans’ uneasiness with unilateralism and their concern that the Iraqi people remain in control of their national future, not to mention the haste with which they turned the page on the neoconservative moment in Washington. Some of them were already aware, in the weeks leading up to war in 2003, that their own internationalist, idealistic agenda might clash with the “realist” nationalist project of those neo-Reaganians who wished to take full advantage of their country’s status as the sole remaining superpower. The differences in focus and the ideological nuances within the transatlantic community of the disillusioned Left and the neoliberal Right stemmed from the fact that the two movements had coalesced at different times in different national and cultural contexts. The French atlantistes never developed as cogent a critique of the welfare state as their American counterparts, focusing instead on issues of political philosophy such as universalism and postmodern relativism. The evolution of the French Right toward liberal democracy after 1945, from the acceptance of decolonization and social programs to a tacit recognition of secularism in public life, explains that one rarely encountered in the writings of the nouveaux philosophes the triumphant exceptionalism associated with the third wave of neoconservatism in the United States. If anything, conscious as they were of the middling power status of contemporary France, many disenfranchised leftists transferred onto the United States the role of champion of the Western Judeo-Christian legacy. In The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Sidney Blumenthal proposed a very convincing socio-cultural account of the birth of neo-

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conservatism among Jewish and Catholic second-generation immigrants born in the interwar period. For Blumenthal, the original neoconservatives were labouring under a triple alienation: personal, professional, and political. As sons of immigrants who faced discrimination and hostility in the tense ethnic climate of the thirties (antiCatholicism of the Ku Klux Klan and the WASP establishment, quotas to limit the admission of Jews to the Ivy League, etc.), they overcompensated for being born in a country that had made it so hard for them and their parents to be fully accepted by developing a strong attachment to Americanism. In the sixties, having secured teaching positions in the prestigious private universities (Yale, Harvard, Columbia) that had barred them from admission as students, they were appalled by what was happening throughout the nation’s campuses. Radical students questioned their legitimacy and authority as professors and their social capital as renowned scholars and rejected a higher education system that had been (in its public university version such as CCNY) the main vector of their own professional promotion and cultural assimilation against all odds. As Nathan Glazer once put it, “We could not assuage student disorder by reminding students that they were the most fortunate of generations in the most idyllic of places (which they, of course, already knew). The student revolt spread from Berkeley to Columbia, where Dan Bell taught, and to many other college campuses. It was a disorder that made no sense to those of us who had come from harder circumstances.”12 The CCNY graduates suffered from a strong case of political frustration as the counterculture and the New Left attacked their country, made it seem as though nothing good ever came of its history, and undermined the meritocratic principles of individual promotion by advocating group rights, reverse discrimination, and affirmative action. As first-generation Americans, they had paid their dues and dutifully played the game, but it looked as though women, sexual and racial minorities, and immigrants from Central and Latin America were now playing under a different set of rules. The same can be said of the many disillusioned leftists who renounced their youthful ideals in post-1968 France and lent their support and their pen to publications such as Le Meilleur des mondes. Like Glazer and Podhoretz, Pierre-André Taguieff, Alexandre Adler, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann were sons of immigrants (respectively from Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia). As newcomers to a foreign land, as first-generation college-bound stu-

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dents raised in the memories of World War II and the struggle against fascism, and, for some of them, as secular Jews socialized in a tradition of Jacobinism, rationalism, and assimilation going back to the days of the Dreyfus Affair, they owed their social mobility and intellectual credentials to a postwar primary and secondary public school system and elite higher education institutions that still operated alongside the political, philosophical, and pedagogical principles of the Third Republic. As a consequence, many of them have taken an active part in the return of the republican idea in France for the past thirty years. Their first-generation experience, coupled with their obvious success in assimilating into French society and mastering to the highest degree the codes of literary language and humanistic training long associated with the highest achievements of the national culture, accounts for their sensitivity to identity issues and their defence of an imagined community threatened by multiculturalism, religious separatism, political correctness, and the rise of mass culture and the entertainment industry. Although he was not a member of the nouveaux philosophes galaxy, Alain Finkielkraut’s celebration of civic humanism, his defence of Enlightenment rationalism against postmodern relativism, his concern for the integrity of the national fabric, his nostalgic praise of the heydays of the Republic’s educational mission, his anti-modern pessimism shared with American Straussians such as Allan Bloom are all compatible with Jacobinism understood not as a specific political doctrine but, more broadly, as the embodiment of the French philosophical tradition. The supporters of what BernardHenri Lévy has called “the universalization of human rights and freedom” were, in many ways, the true neo-Jacobins described in the previous chapter, not only in Ryn’s sense of advocating a worldwide crusade for democracy, the US military playing in their re-enactment of revolutionary messianism the role of the Nation-at-arms of 1793 but, more importantly, through their identification of Frenchness with universalism. Is it accurate, then, to call Gopnik’s anti-anti-Americans “neoconservatives à la française,” as so many of their opponents have done? No, if one considers that American exceptionalism is a key component of the original neoconservative agenda, which made it a viable ideology only in the United States. Besides, the French “neoconservatives” are not sovereigntists but globalists, advocates of supranational institutions such as NATO and the European Union. The American neocons’ Wilsonianism on steroids, as Walter Russell Mead once put it, is a

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homegrown ideology as American as apple pie, since they often use universalist language to advance national interests in the global arena.13 The French anti-anti-Americans do resemble their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic to the extent that the anti-communism of the disillusioned Left is rooted in the socio-cultural origins, intellectual roots, and political trajectories shared by the postwar CCNY cohort and the “class of 1968” at the École Normale Supérieure. ULTRATLANTICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

The French resistance to the war in Iraq proved to be short-lived, since Jacques Chirac’s presidency ended in 2007. His successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, had served as minister of the interior and minister of finances before becoming the leader of the UMP (Union for a Popular Movement), the party Chirac had founded in order to gain re-election in 2002. The new president nevertheless adopted a radically different foreign policy despite his neo-Gaullist credentials. By 2009, France had rejoined NATO’s integrated military command, and under the Socialist François Hollande (2012–17), Paris became one of the most reliable allies of the United States in the global war against Islamist warlords, notably in Saharan Africa. Sarkozy met with George W. Bush in September 2006, seeking Washington’s endorsement on the eve of his campaign for the French presidency. A passage from his pre-campaign book, Testimony, underscored the profound change in foreign policy he would champion if he were elected, a program the Socialist minister of foreign affairs, Hubert Védrine, humorously called irrealpolitik (Desuin 2017, 44). Human rights, the candidate announced, would be at the heart of his administration’s concerns, as opposed to the outdated realpolitik based on the international balance of power among sovereign nations and the non-intervention in other countries’ internal affairs favoured by his predecessors: “At the risk of seeming naive in the eyes of cynics, I believe in the necessity of preserving, incarnating, and defending our values in the international debate. Put another way, I do not belong to the realpolitik school, which says that you should sacrifice your principles on the altar of greater economic interests. At the top of the list of values to be preserved is respect for human rights. This is not in my view a mere detail. It’s the foundation of the very

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notion of international community ... From my point of view, France’s image in the world and ability to get things done would benefit from a foreign policy that showed real intransigence on the issue of universal values. France has always incarnated these values, but it has not always defended them strongly enough” (Sarkozy 2007, 198–9). Sarkozy was careful not to object too vehemently to Chirac’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq, if only for electoral reasons, since he needed the votes of his predecessor’s supporters to defeat his socialist rival. He nevertheless hinted at the need for profound change in French–American relations, based on his own personal distaste for anti-Americanism. “The United States is a country that some of France’s elites claim to detest, or at least criticize regularly in a stereotypical way ... But where our strategic interests are concerned, systematically opposing the United States is a mistake ... Thus on Iraq, our disagreements were legitimate, but they would have had more impact had they not been coupled with the threat of using our veto. France is strong enough to refrain from passionate, allergic, or excessive reactions. I believe we need to get along with the United States” (195). After his election, Sarkozy told Allan Hubbard, George W. Bush’s economic advisor: “They call me Sarkozy the American. They think it’s an insult, but I take it as a compliment,” and he reportedly assured the American president that “I can promise you that you will feel at home when you come to France. I want to make France another America” (cited in Desuin 2017, 20). It appeared that les anti-anti-Américains had won the battle of ideas as their friends, disciples, and allies in think tanks and foundations became increasingly influential within the military, diplomatic, and national security sectors of subsequent French governments during the decade 2007–17, designing and advocating policies that were closely aligned with mondialisation (the French term for globalization) under American leadership.14 Paradoxically, as neoconservatives were gradually removed from the Obama administration, the atlantistes in Paris managed to gain a stronger foothold in foreign policy circles. By the time Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, half a century after Charles de Gaulle’s decisive break with the core components of NATO, the French armed forces had not only been gradually reduced in size but for all practical purposes absorbed within NATO structures, with the exception of the country’s nuclear armament program.

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The return of the Atlanticists (a term many of their critics use interchangeably with that of neoconservatives) was not unanimously celebrated within the foreign policy establishment. The mass killings of January and November 2015 prompted renewed calls for France’s distancing from the passive, uncritical acquiescence to American national interests and to enact a rapprochement with Russia’s counter-terrorism policies, while the Hollande administration’s failed diplomacy in Syria was the subject of harsh criticism. In March 2016, journalist Renaud Girard, author of several books on international relations in the post-9/11 era, published in Le Figaro a scathing attack on the current state of French diplomacy in the Middle East.15 Girard lamented the fact that France had been excluded from the negotiations in Syria and had made the fateful mistake of closing its embassy in Damascus in keeping with socialist Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius’s mantra: “Neither Bachar nor Daech.” Girard remarked that “diplomacy’s function is not to talk to one’s friends” and advocated a realistic approach to international relations. Besides, Fabius’s false equivalence did not hold, since the Syrian dictator, for all the brutal repression of his people, had never killed innocent citizens on French soil. The real enemy was the Islamic State, and it had unfortunately taken the terrorist strikes in Paris to convince the French president to make the trip to Moscow and arrange with Putin a joint military response against jihadists in Syria. Fond of quoting de Gaulle on foreign policy, Girard reminded his readers of the general’s famous remark in 1959 that “France does not have friends, but only interests.” The century-old French-Russian alliance had served the country well in 1914, and its leaders should have understood in the thirties, as it would behoove them to do today, who the real enemy was, i.e., Hitler, not the Bolsheviks, who did not pose a real threat to French society. The French neoconservatives were blamed once again for espousing misguided, obsolete ideas, “as though having been right against the United States on the Iraq war, France had been terrified by its own boldness, and had fallen back in line as fast as possible.” Hadrien Desuin, a graduate of the St-Cyr Military School and a specialist in geopolitics, concurred. In La France atlantiste, published a year after Girard’s piece, he provided a detailed account of the way French–American relations had become, in his own terms, “a soft and quiet vassalage,” away from the sometimes difficult partnership that had prevailed during the Gaullist and to a certain extent Mitterandist presidencies (1958–69 and 1981–95) (Desuin 2017). Like Girard, he

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argued for closer ties with Russia, called for an end to the sanctions imposed on Moscow after the invasion of Crimea in 2014, and favoured a more decisive engagement against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. An advocate of vigorous diplomacy based on realpolitik, increased independence from the United States, and a major role for the United Nations Security Council (of which France is a permanent member), Desuin had been a resolute critic of “idealistic” neoconservative policies. In his view, the messianism of the deluded “champions of a felicitous globalization” was mistaken on a variety of grounds. The naive advocates of humanitarian military intervention praised the weakening of nationalism without realizing that it leads to an increasingly more violent ethnic and tribal fragmentation across the world. Relying as they were on a utopian conception of universal democracy based on international law and the right of Western powers to intervene unilaterally in genocidal or brutally repressive conflicts, neoconservatives ended up erroneously reducing “every international crisis to a collective news item (fait divers).” Throughout the book, Desuin drew a sharp contrast between the anti-anti-Americans’ “universal religion of human rights” and supranationalist principles based on symbolic, media-driven gestures and discourses, on the one hand, and, on the other, a century-old geostrategic French tradition based on la Raison d’État (Reason of State), going back to the consolidation of the French national state in the sixteenth century. Breaking with customary religious alliances, King Francis I had sought an alliance with the Turks against the Catholic Habsburgs, a decisive break with the legacy of the medieval Holy Roman Empire born of the Crusades. On the basis of the new European order emerging from the Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), the French monarchy had favoured the Protestant princes over the Catholic powers (Spain and Austria), putting the country’s sovereignty and influence before the cultural politics of the religious blocs. Desuin attributed Kissinger and Nixon’s admiration for de Gaulle’s foreign policy to the general’s unflinching adherence to the realpolitik principles championed by the likes of Richelieu and Metternich (11). For Desuin, “l’atlantisme droit-de-l’hommiste” (human rights Atlanticism) shared by idealistic liberal interventionists had disastrous diplomatic and military consequences, especially in the Middle East. He reserved his most critical assessment to the twin figures of B.-H. Lévy and Bernard Kouchner, given their influence among public intellectuals, the media, and institutional politics and non-governmental

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organizations. Kouchner’s trajectory closely resembles that of many anti-anti-Americans, from sixties radicalism to anti-communism to socialism and the centre-right. Excluded from the French Communist Party in 1966, the physician co-founded Doctors Without Borders and later Médecins du Monde, served as secrétaire d’État for humanitarian action and minister of health in successive left-wing governments after 1986, and joined the Sarkozy administration as minister of foreign and European affairs (2007–10). He was the United Nations representative in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and opposed military intervention in Iraq, advocating UN-led, preferably diplomatic efforts to end Saddam Hussein’s rule. Desuin credited him with providing a “hybrid synthesis” between the Atlanticist camp and the world of non-governmental organizations, combining militant humanistic pacifism and the notion of a protective responsibility devolved to Western democracies and the United Nations’ peacekeeping “soldiers of peace,” the Blue Helmets (26). Lévy figured even more prominently than Kouchner in La France atlantiste, given his strategic positioning at the intersection of several fields, intellectual, literary, editorial, journalistic, and political, and the breadth of his international connections. The section entitled la symbolique BHL chronicles the extent of his influence in the written and visual media and the extent of his relentless “rhetoric of indignation” against totalitarian regimes. Close to deciders and power brokers in both the centre-right and centre-left sides of the political spectrum, Lévy “embodie[d] the continuity between Sarkozy and Hollande,” from post-Gaullists to the “social-liberal” (i.e., anti-statist, internationalist) wing of the Socialist party. As unofficial secretary of state and diplomatic advisor to two consecutive presidents, skillfully combining media interventions, support for military mobilization, and appeal to international tribunals, Lévy had ambitions to be de Gaulle’s Malraux or Nixon’s Kissinger in the Hollande government. In an interview given to Le Nouvel Observateur on 3 February 2016, he claimed that his views were squarely anchored in the tradition of the Left: “The true memory of the left is internationalism against noninterventionism, care for the world against nationalism. Generosity against the filth that souverainisme represents, today as well as yesterday. What is sovereignism? It is the idea that right does not exist or that it is, more precisely, subject to the law of borders” (quoted in Desuin 2017, 45). Apropos Lévy’s and other Parisian intellectuals’ belief in the Kantian/Wilsonian model of perpetual peace based on

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internationally sanctioned collective security insured by a league of democracies, Desuin quipped that “seen from the left bank, all means are justified, since there is only one antifascist struggle to be eternally recommenced” (176). For different reasons, the elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron gave heart to the opponents of the ultratlantiste caste entrenched at the highest level of the French state. Trump’s exit from the Paris climate agreement, was, in Desuin’s words, a double slap in the face of the neoconservatives. As for Macron, the author was encouraged by his statement in Le Figaro that “with me, it will be the end of a form of neoconservatism imported in France for the past ten years.” It was a sign that the new president would adopt a more realistic and balanced approach to the situation in Southwest Asia and would recoil from “the ideological blindness” of his predecessor who had underestimated Bachar-el-Assad’s ability to stay in power and thereby strengthened the Islamic State. Hopefully, Macron would put the country’s interests above “the posture of international avenger” favored by Hollande, acknowledge the failure of “sorcerer’s apprentice” strategies pursuing regime change by force (Iraq, 2003, and Libya, 2011), and move away from the obsessive attempts to counter Russia and Iran by the most hawkish foreign policy advisors in Washington (such as John Bolton). Despite these encouraging signs, Desuin did not expect a return to the kind of diplomacy formerly inspired by (neo)Gaullist principles. It was too late, since the French people “have closed the Gaullist parenthesis ... and more or less internalized the strategic self-dissolution of our country.” As for the “myth of a European defence,” de Gaulle himself had already understood by 1963 that “for Germany and East European countries,” the real European defence was NATO under American leadership (12). In many ways, Desuin shared some common ground with those who opposed the collapsing of national institutions and identities into globalized entities such as the European Union and NATO. American foreign policy, regardless of its various historical incarnations (isolationism, interventionism) rested on a belief in the country’s exceptionalism, “the certainty that the United States has a mission to evangelize and that humankind must follow the American motherland.” Meanwhile, the misguided messianism of the French internationalists was predicated on “an off-the-ground [horssol], uprooted and abstract” national self-loathing that prevented France from confidently assuming the independent role its history

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and current ranking among middling economic powers entitled her to play. Desuin’s realism, however, was not cynical in the sense of a blanket endorsement of dictatorships every time it served France’s national security interests in the war on terror. Convinced that the way of the world showed “a return of history in its tragic dimension” (13), he acknowledged that there was ample ground to “be justly disgusted by Saddam’s tyranny” (54) and deplored that “in order to break away from his economic and strategic isolation, progressive France, heir to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, gives herself up to divine right oil-producing monarchies who actively support Salafist propaganda” (104). His quarrel with the neoconservatives was not that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was not brutally repressive, not even that it insured regional stability, but that it served as a bulwark against Sunni extremists, thereby protecting Shia and Christian minorities. The major sin of the American crusaders bent on exporting the “empire of virtue” through the combination of might and right was their ignorance, willful or genuine, of “the fragility of the national cultures and civilizations” targeted by regime change from outside. Such military adventurism ended up punishing civilian populations for the brutality of their governments or the presence in their midst of extremist non-state organizations. Genuine concern for national cultures and civilizations, however, leaves aside the fate of those same populations when they object to their treatment by a repressive nation-state. Given his view that the only legitimate framework for the imagined community is the nation, since infra-national or supranational ideologies only lead to the increased fragmentation of the world, Desuin relied on the Gaullist view that peoples have a right to self-determination (le droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes) to ground his rejection of globalism but conveniently ignored the issue of what constitutes a “people” endowed with such rights, historically, culturally, and/or linguistically. In the French context, for example, Corsicans and Martinicans, who have a distinctive cultural history and a right to nationhood for independentists but not a state of their own, are not entitled to selfdetermination. De Gaulle famously argued in 1967 that the Quebeckers should be free from Anglo-Canadian domination, presumably on the basis of their previous inclusion in the nascent French transatlantic empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but he conveniently refrained from making a similar case for indepen-

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dence for the French Antilles, whose inhabitants officially became citizens only in 1945. Is Iraq a nation rather than the artificial creation, like Syria and Palestine, of British and French colonialism, and was Saddam Hussein justified in keeping Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds together by force, including the use of chemical weapons? Desuin’s nationalism, grounded upon a solid knowledge of France’s geopolitical tradition, prevented him from acknowledging that the “resistance to hegemony” might not be entirely based on the cold logic of the Reason of state he valued over “emotional and compassionate” diplomacy. The United States is obviously not the only country where universalist principles have been mobilized in support of national interests. France, for one, has long taken pride in being “the country of human rights,” using, for example, the idea of her civilizing mission to promote colonialism, long before the United States took the mantel of messianic leadership in 1945. Several citations in Desuin’s book, from Jules Michelet to François Hollande, underscored French exceptionalism but seemingly without the negative connotation associated with a similar set of rival claims when coming from America. What are we to make, for example, of Michelet’s praiseful address to his beloved République: “France, our mother, who is not only ours and who must give birth to every Nation into Liberty!” (45)? The historian’s statement echoes du Bellay’s well-known poem dedicated to France, “Mother of Arms, Letters and Laws,” written from Rome at a time (1558) when the French monarchical state emerged in the midst of successful military campaigns in Italy. Ten years earlier, the poet’s Defense and Illustration of the French Language had issued a robust challenge to the legacy of the ancient world and the lasting cultural dominance of the Italian quattrocento, ushering in a national literature destined to become one of the major expressions of Frenchness. And what about Nicolas Sarkozy, who claimed that “France’s message is relevant for the entire world” (Sarkozy 2007, 188), or François Hollande’s belief that “our foreign policy goes well beyond our interests. Its vocation is to be useful to the entire planet”? Were those remarks the preposterous claims of naive humanitarians or the latest paeans to the country’s glorious past, not so different, after all, from de Gaulle’s repeated reminders, in his speeches and writings, of la grandeur de la France? Pierre Bourdieu proposed in an essay called Deux impérialismes de l’universel (1992) to read French–American relations as the confrontation of two competing forms of universalist cultural imperialism.

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Although dominant nations all allege to embody universal values and principles at various moments in their history, France and the United States have claimed to be endowed with substantial symbolic assets (capitaux symboliques) to a greater legitimacy in the global arena. The former has used its own founding myth, the French Revolution, to pretend to monopolize the universal in modern times, appropriating the (foreign) Kantian and Marxist intellectual traditions in order to turn the legacy of 1789 into the model of all revolutions to follow. As a result, the French have felt “authorized (at least until the Second World War) to exert a form of cultural imperialism,” “a realized ideology” of the nation particularly salient during the country’s colonial enterprise justified as a civilizing, emancipatory, and ultimately assimilationist mission.“To be French,” Bourdieu wrote, “is to feel a right to universalize one’s particular interest, this national interest whose specificity is to be universal” (150–1), using political, aesthetic, and linguistic specificities to turn a particular culture into an absolute. Bourdieu alluded (without quoting them) to “texts Paul Valéry wrote about Paris that are superb in their unconscionable triumphalism” (151) in order to illustrate the fact that France had been and still was, “despite the fact that her monopoly of the universal is strongly contested, especially by the United States, the arbiter of elegant taste,” providing the entire world with “the spectacle of the play of the universal and particularly of this art of transgression that defines the political and/or artistic avant-gardes” (152). More than any other modern nation, the United States has challenged the French hegemonic strategy by absolutizing its own “Revolution,” its attendant political institutions, and its Constitution as guarantor of civil liberties, the rule of law, and the balance of powers. In Bourdieu’s view, Tocqueville contributed greatly to popularizing “the myth of democracy in America” (152), helping to transform what many of his compatriots saw as a mere anti-colonial struggle for independence in one of the backwaters of the British Empire into a worldhistorical event of momentous consequences, although to this day French historians of the United States still use the term la guerre d’indépendance américaine to refer to the American Revolution. In addition to affirming its political and religious exceptionalism, the United States embarked upon its own imperial expansion with the annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American war of 1898 and began to assert its cultural universality as well, thereby contesting the French claims to dominance in this area, from architecture and

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urbanism to visual arts, music, and cinema. Bourdieu agreed with the common view of the genealogy of an anti-Americanism of resentment and revenge stemming from the growing clash after 1945 between “an ascending imperialism and an imperialism in decline” (153). He also underlined the role played in the rise of American cultural hegemony by moral discourse, “the strong point of the United States (all American interventions since 1917 having used universal claims and the defense of moral values as cover); and one would need to analyze the strategies of universalization deployed during the Gulf War. The return to ethics that some in France welcome today, is not unconnected to the advance of American cultural imperialism” (153). THE END OF A LOVE AFFAIR

Charges against the moral(istic) side of American exceptionalism remained a key component of the post-9/11 debate in France. Hadrien Desuin’s objection to the armed Wilsonianism of the “post-national liberals,” as he sometimes calls neoconservatives, is partly based on the fact that the 28th president of the United States (1913–21) was the son of a Presbyterian minister in Virginia, which goes a long way to explain why Wilson replaced the old European realist conception of the balance of powers with a mixture of legalism, Christian morality, and a belief in “democratic evangelization under American warranty.” Revisiting the debate about the identities of Europe described in the previous chapter, Desuin argued that after 9/11, France and Germany also seemed to be suffering from a borrowed Wilsonian syndrome: “It is as though Europe, repentant from her horrendous contemporary history [the Shoa and decolonization], is trying to plagiarize the mythical creation of America and to establish itself as a second City upon the Hill ... to build an ideal reality now that it has gone out of history.” The new European border would be “set above nationalist depravities and egocentric interests, guiding humanity to collective Security solely by its values and its selflessness ... Through its excessive dream of being American, Paris has wished to surpass Washington by displaying an absolute intransigence regarding democracy and human rights. Enough, paradoxically, to be in the way of Barack Obama’s more realistic diplomacy” (Desuin 2017, 12).

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The allergy to American messianism is not specific to those who, like Desuin, have substantial objections to US foreign policy on nationalist grounds. Some anti-anti-American globalists share it too, support for the Atlantic alliance having been, from the Cold War onward, the product of a self-interested instrumentalization of US power, as long as it remains credible and predictable, and hence useful, rather than a deeply felt, unconditional admiration for the American experiment, religious, mass cultural, or otherwise. I have mentioned Raymond Aron’s reservations on the irrationality of America’s crusading spirit in foreign policy matters as well as Alexandre Adler’s comments on the naive moralism of Wilsonian interventionists or the infantile side of the Baptist religious ethos. In a television interview on 21 December 2017, Pascal Bruckner proposed, without any apparent trepidation, that “the myth of an America that is both outside the world and has the ambition of saving humanity as a whole, since Americans think of themselves as the salt of the earth, a people chosen by God, the new Jerusalem, this entire project seems to have been in a pretty bad way since September 11, 2001.”16 Wasn’t that precisely the project underlining the Bush doctrine in the Middle East? If it was already misguided in 2001, then why support it two years later, as Bruckner himself did, when the target of America’s saving grace moved from Afghanistan to Iraq? On the one hand, Bruckner’s previous support of Western humanitarian interventions in the former Yugoslavia would make him an easy target of anti-globalists. On the other, his relentless critique, in a series of books, of postcolonial “masochism,” of Islamophobia as “imaginary racism,” and of the “environmental catastrophism” that scares citizens into easily manipulated children had put him squarely in the camp of those who, to quote Desuin, deplore that “the nanny state has replaced the welfare state” (Desuin 2017, 38). Bruckner’s appearance on French television followed an op-ed in Le Monde in which he had sketched an extremely negative portrait of the United States, highlighting the sorry state of the country that openly belied the long-held belief that Americans are God’s chosen people. “Since the election of Donald Trump,” Bruckner wrote, “many have sunk in a melancholia closed to self-deprecation. The shame of having brought to the highest level of government a vulgar and violent buffoon is added to a feeling of moral decay, obvious since the September 11 attacks revealed the vulnerability of the U.S. fortress.” If the

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vitriolic charge against Donald Trump was to be expected, the reader was more surprised to learn that “the first world power” had done it before by electing “in 2001 a former alcoholic and narrow-minded bigot” in the person of George W. Bush, whom Bruckner had hailed as the liberator of Iraq some fourteen years earlier.17 In April 2003, in yet another op-ed in Le Monde entitled “The Mistake,” Bruckner had co-signed with André Glucksmann and film director Romain Goupil a scathing attack on the return of classic French anti-Americanism in the Élysée Palace, the media, and among the third of their compatriots who did not wish to see the victory of the US-led coalition: “By his intransigence and the promise of a veto ‘whatever the circumstances,’ our country has divided Europe, paralyzed NATO and the United Nations, ruined the non-military possibilities of forcing the Iraqi dictatorship to give in, by way of a common and precise ultimatum ... Someday, the hysteria, the collective intoxication that have struck the country for months, the apocalyptic anxiety that has taken hold of our best minds, the quasi Soviet-like atmosphere that has welded together 90% of the population ... will need recounting.” Anti-Americanism, which many had believed was a thing of the past, including in the Gopnik essay quoted at the onset of this chapter, was back with a vengeance, not as “an accident due to current events or mere reticence regarding the administration in Washington, but as a political creed that holds together, despite their differences, the National Front and the Greens, the socialists and the conservatives, the communists, the souverainistes ... From the right to the left, rare are those who did not yield to this ‘nationalism of fools’ that is always a symptom of resentment and decline.”18 As expected, the piece was not devoid of misgivings and cautionary comments regarding the future of the war, a somewhat ironic foretaste of Le Meilleur des mondes’ acknowledgment five years later that “Bush is not Roosevelt.” “The future of a liberated Iraq remains highly problematic,” warned the authors, “and pacification far from being certain. It is not sure that Washington will triumph with modesty, nor that the military conquest will bring about, as by magic, civil harmony in hearts and minds.” The cautionary tale would turn apocalyptic in Bruckner’s 2017 op-ed, with a long list of woes ensuring that, as prophesied in the title of the piece, the twenty-first century might be Chinese or Indian but would never be American. Three hundred million guns in circulation, a rising number of mass murders, a partisan, lying, and censoring press, determined survivalist or

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supremacist militias, the spectre of civil war, and, last but not least, the tyranny of political correctness on the nation’s campuses, hardly a new complaint by critics of the United States, ensured that the American century was over. Political correctness has become in the past thirty years a highly mobile, empty signifier, often holding a variety of sometimes contradictory meanings and frequently serving to discredit proponents of rival ideologies. National-populists have turned it against globalists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy, who used it, like Bruckner, against radical feminists and multiculturalists in the United States. When asked recently about his earlier complaint that the American justice system had unfairly targeted and indicted French socialist politician and then-head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique StraussKahn, accused of sexually assaulting a black female employee in a New York City hotel in 2011 (the case was later dismissed), Lévy stated that “today, in America, you have this huge wave of political correctness, which was good at the start, which was good in principle, but which has ... produced some crazy effect, and this is one.”19 The reference to political correctness in Bruckner’s 2017 piece echoed the transatlantic debates of the 1990s opposing (French) universalism and (American) communitarianism as well as the Gallic harmonious commerce between the sexes in the tradition of the literary salons against the male-bashing radical feminism of women’s studies departments on the other side of the Atlantic. In Bruckner’s view, things had only gotten worse in the following two decades, America having “replaced the Old World’s class struggle with the war among the races, European universalist feminism with the ceaseless strife between men and women, the sublimation of desire with lecherous puritanism, and the republican project of citizenry with an endless fragmentation into minority groups.” One only had to witness “the institution of safe spaces on campuses where women, gays, lesbians and Blacks confine themselves away from the outside world ... The culture of campuses is quite concerning in this respect: instead of being sources of collective intelligence, some of them, among the most reputable, promote a left-wing McCarthyism, banning access to free speech to anyone who is not acceptable ... a brain-washing process similar to that of Maoism or the Khmer Rouge, happening, with the best intentions, in the greatest Western democracy.” The reference to communism remains de rigueur, of course, in this case the East Asian version, but the Soviet reference is never far, as

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when the New York Times is compared to the Stalinist Pravda in a passage faulting American liberals for their chronic misreading of the religious question in (secular) France. After “the two laws of 2004 and 2010 on the Islamic veil in schools and the public space [were passed], the entire Anglo-Saxon left accused Paris of racism ... Worse yet: on September 2, 2016, the New York Times, in an article worthy of Pravda, declared on the front page that France was a prison for Muslims. The prestigious East Coast daily meant to showcase the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon model over French-style secularism. But it showcased instead the marriage of bigotry and condescendence: America loses it when it comes to religion, and it isn’t good, over there, to be an agnostic or an atheist.” The “Soviet-like atmosphere” that prevented France from siding with the United States in the liberation of Iraq had now crossed the Atlantic. Bruckner unwittingly offered in passing his own version of Melvin Lasky’s cycle of transatlantic relations mentioned in the introduction: “Each time America is beset by self-doubt, it turns against France (the opposite is also true): it was the case in 2003, during the second Gulf War ... when the neoconservatives, enraged against Paris, turned French fires into freedom fries.” No mention of the fact that the fierce critic of the moral collapse of America in the Trump era was an ally of the same neoconservatives at the time and had penned his own virulent anti-French diatribes, accusing his country of having done everything to delay the fall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. But, as the French are fond of saying, seuls les imbéciles ne changent pas d’avis (fools are the only ones who never change their minds), and everyone knows that intellectuals, of all people, are immune from imbecility and as a consequence are prone (and justified) in turning their coats more than once. The tables, too, had been turned. In their 2003 piece in Le Monde, Bruckner, Glucksmann, and Goupil had deplored the same arrogant condescendence on the part of the French that Americans were now faulted for and denounced the way European elites ridiculed the president of the United States (yes, the same one whom Bruckner dismissed in 2017 as a repentant drunk and a bigot): “It’s been fashionable, recently,” the three friends wrote at the time, “to oppose French intelligence to the narrowness of the American mind, and the wisdom of Old Europe to the madness of a New World led by ‘Ubush roi’ [a pun on the title of Alfred Jarry’s 1896 satirical and parodic play, Ubu Roi, featuring a ridiculous and outrageous king]. As a result, one

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of the most dreadful dictatorships in the Middle East has fallen, but France has in no way contributed to its fall.” Fourteen years later, Bruckner had come to conclude that America had lost both its “hard” and “soft” powers, its ability to rule the world whether by force or by seduction. Since the Clinton years were gone forever, the present diagnosis was irrevocable: empires all die one day from self-satisfied pride, and no one in the world any longer wishes to be American. “Up until the early years of the 21st century, America launched fashions, trends, and currents, she enjoyed an immense power of seduction, including among its enemies. We had been used to such an abundance of miracles in the areas of music, theater, literature and cinema that the source seems to have dried up ... How long has it been since we have read a great American novel, seen a great American film, discovered a great American artist?” International relations, like nature, abhor a vacuum, and Bruckner saw the decline of the United States “at least for a generation” as a chance for his own country (now that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was “worn out and discredited”) to reclaim the political and moral leadership in Europe and perhaps even the “monopoly of the universal, Human Rights, and Humanity,” as Bourdieu had put it, that France had reluctantly conceded to the United States after World War II (Bourdieu 1992, 150). Bruckner’s last comments erased the national humiliation of 2003, when le pays des droits de l’homme had refused to join the coalition of the willing and take a stand against totalitarianism in the Middle East. It was left to the recently elected French president, Emanuel Macron, to carry “on his shoulders the fate of the Old World. It is France’s contemporary moment. Intoxicating and dreadful responsibility.” Bruckner’s hope in the new French president was amusing in retrospect, since he had faulted both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for Trump’s victory, blaming their public statements disrespecting the low-income voters who would make up the future president’s electoral base. Ironically, the populist revolt of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) against Emanuel Macron a year later was also fuelled by his own disparaging comments against low-income workers and the unemployed, the latter being invited to improve their socio-economic situation, among other things, by simply “crossing the street and getting a job.” In his previously mentioned essay on French and American imperialisms of the universal, Pierre Bourdieu had described cross-national judgments as a chance for cultural producers to engage in “strategies

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of universalization” aimed at defending their “national symbolic capital against a real or imaginary aggression. “Intellectuals, who are the first ones concerned with the imperialism of the universal,” Bourdieu wrote, “find in an ambiguous reality countless opportunities to foster their strategies of bad faith” (Bourdieu’s italics, 154). Bruckner’s proclamation of the end of the American century provided just one of these moments of duplicity. In Bourdieu’s words, “things are not that simple, and the ruses of bad faith are innumerable ... Interests bound up with the struggle for cultural hegemony in the national space may lead some nationals to become complicit with the cultural imperialism from abroad – while others confine themselves to regressive nationalism” (154). These comments provide a useful framework to problematize the “simple” opposition between neo-Gaullist nationalists and neoliberal internationalists that has framed the politics of 9/11 in France. Bruckner’s combination of nostalgic paean to an America that is no longer and stinging account of its present sorry state reads like a case of Schadenfreude, the anti-anti-Americanism of yore having soured into a bitter reckoning with the inadequacies of a disappointing old flame. America had lost its seductive power, and it was high time for France, in the person of its young, charismatic new president, to become again the object of the world’s desire.

Introduction

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5 French Evangelicals and the Bush Legacy

When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, French secularists were in the midst of a fifteen-year struggle to uphold the principles of the République in matters of “conscience” against what they denounced as increasing threats to the separation of church and state from fundamentalist Muslim communities. The Catholic hierarchy was taken to task for allying itself with the establishment of Islamic schools in a united front to promote the public funding of all religious educational institutions. Even the relatively inconspicuous evangelical churches suddenly came under attack as a result of their association with George W. Bush’s religion, and their pastors appeared just as threatening to secular principles as Salafist preachers in radical mosques. In this context, the God-centred ethos of the American Moral Majority was felt to be overly emotional, dangerously irrational, and unusually prone to intolerance, bigotry, and superstition. The view from France was that a large part of American society had not been sufficiently permeated by the post-Enlightenment secularization process that had gradually and thoroughly dechristianized French culture in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the number of books by French or American authors (in translation) published at the time on George W. Bush’s blend of religion and politics.1 What critics in both Europe and America resented about the White House was a particular moralizing tone and religious style, a make-it-or-break-it attitude that stemmed in large part from what editorialist and war correspondent Michael Kelly, who died during the Battle of Baghdad, had called George W. Bush’s “armed Evangelism.” This, of course, is nothing new to students of American history. Those Americans who have favoured

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their nation’s many wars have often seen them as moralistic crusades, whether it was, in the words of Seymour Martin Lipset, “to eliminate monarchical rule (the War of 1812), to defeat the Catholic forces of superstition (the Mexican War), to eliminate slavery (the Civil War), to end colonialism in the Americas (the Spanish-American War), to make the world safe for democracy (World War I) or to resist totalitarian expansionism (World War II)” (Lipset 1997, 65). Bringing peace, pluralism, and prosperity to the Middle East through regime change was no exception to the rule, but public debates often operate on short memory and limited knowledge of history. Following the end of the Cold War, during the decade leading up to 9/11, the decreasing urgency of the ideological conflict that had united parts of the West in the common cause against communism allowed previously overlooked or understated commonalities to come to the fore. A growing number of liberals and progressives on both sides of the Atlantic saw eye to eye on cultural and social issues such as environmentalism, abortion rights, the need to protect the welfare state, support of diplomacy instead of military force, and separation of church and state. Beyond the relevance of Tocqueville’s interpretive triad of religion, patriotism, and pragmatism to twenty-first century struggles, there lay the conviction, shared by many during the Bush years, that there was altogether too much Hobbes and too much Calvin in American culture and not enough Erasmus, Descartes, or Voltaire, too much sectarian Reformation and not enough secular Renaissance and enlightened toleration. To say that the Atlantic as insulator allowed for the development of the specific religious patriotism that was once again sweeping across the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 is only a partial view, of course, because it ignored the other half of the North Atlantic experience. The characteristic fusion of evangelical faith and messianic foreign policy did not take place in Canada to the extent it did in the United States. One of the most compelling aspects of Michael Moore’s film about gun violence in the United States, Bowling for Columbine, was the director’s attempt to find in other countries, and specifically north of the border, elements to understand his compatriots’ propensity to engage in violent behaviour, whether individually or collectively. From crime to religion to foreign policy to race relations, Canadian and American cultures have behaved differently, as either carriers or inhibitors of European symbols, beliefs, and practices. In a way, the transatlantic rift mentioned above cuts across the two neighbouring

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countries as much as it separates America from Europe. The opposition of both the Canadian government and a large fraction of the citizenry to the war in Iraq is a case in point (they, too, lived on Venus). As far as North Atlantic studies are concerned, comparativism as a theoretical and methodological requirement is extremely useful, since it brings out both the specificity of the United States as a postcolonial society that, unlike the dominion to the north, broke up with British rule through a successful armed rebellion and became a distinct, and later a dominant, part of the fractured, multi-faceted complex we call, somewhat hastily, “the West.” 9/11 AS RELIGIOUS WAR : THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

September 11, of course, was from the start steeped in religious rhetoric, both from the attackers and the attacked. Before and after the event, US foreign policy in the Middle East was couched by many in terms of a fundamental opposition between Islam and the West identified for the sake of the argument with Christianity, if not with Christendom, including the obligatory references to the medieval Crusades. George W. Bush’s frequent references to God in his foreign policy speeches, as well as his political ties to the conservative Christian Right, figured prominently in the French allergy to the kind of apocalyptic Christianity championed by the American president. Comments on the peculiar and unpalatable nature of American religious culture made the headlines of news magazines, filled the op-ed pages of influential dailies, and became the topic of extensive television reporting. The satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, known for its anti-clericalism, published a number of cartoons showing the American president and members of his administration praying between policy sessions for a prompt victory in Iraq. When asked by reporters whether he “prayed with President Bush,” the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who otherwise made no secret of his Anglican faith, bristled at the question and testily denied ever doing so. By contrast, religion was not on the forefront of anti-American sentiment from the 1930s to the Cold War. Literary accounts of life in the United States by Céline, Duhamel, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, for example, devoted only a few pages, if any, to religious beliefs and practices, outside of the ritual denunciation of the widespread cult of the Almighty Dollar. While negative views

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shared by the left and the right focused primarily on consumerist materialism, the film industry as mind-numbing mass culture, or urbanism gone mad, the fifties and sixties were more political, with the thrust of the criticism directed at economic, military, and cultural imperialism. The display of patriotism triggered by 9/11 brought religion back to the fore as a result of the distinctly American connection between nationalism and faith (the flag and the cross), renewed domestic debates at home on the country as a Christian nation and the constitutional protection of religious freedom from the government. Historically, the separation of church and state had meant defending churches from the state in America and the republican state from the Catholic Church in France. After 9/11, the transatlantic conversation was to a certain extent thrown back to an earlier period, not only to the thirties, when the opposition between two incompatible cultural formations, a proliferating “American way of life” and a threatened “European civilization,” was the preferred topos of critics of the United States – but even further back in time to the shock wave the swift and violent American conquest of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 had sent throughout Europe. The French were once again wondering whether Americans might not be even stranger than they had previously suspected. The North Atlantic, which had come to represent, through the institution of NATO, a common political, ideological, and military Western bloc opposed to Soviet influence and cemented through a shared history of democratic struggles and achievements, had become the site of deep lines of fracture. American exceptionalism seemed to extend far beyond dress codes and tastes in cars, food, or popular culture. The transatlantic difference appeared to be rooted in deep anthropological structures; it had to do with weighty questions of morality, sexuality, metaphysical beliefs, and perennial life and death issues, quite literally, as evidenced by marked disagreements on abortion and the death penalty. Warlike metaphors surfaced on several occasions to warn readers about the seemingly irresistible threat posed by the Christian equivalent of radical Islamism. In December 2004, Courrier International’s front-page headline proclaimed: “Crazy about Jesus. The Evangelicals Conquer the World,” while France Culture (the French NPR) devoted one of its broadcast a year later to Christian fundamentalists’ “assault on laïcité.”2 The French weekly Marianne summed it up with the heading: “The Bush Sect on the Attack,” lumping evangelical churches

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together with spiritual “cults” such as the Church of Scientology, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. These accounts often collapsed varying features of born-again Protestantism (fundamentalist, pentecostal, and charismatic), recycling similar references, clichés, and rhetorical tropes. Media reports focused on the growing influence of evangelicalism in the United States and the world, while underscoring the most spectacular public manifestations of the religious Right in America (emotional liturgy, aggressive proselytism, megachurches, billionaire televangelists, sex scandals, etc). THE WHEEL KEEPS TURNING

By pushing into the background the shared legacy of western Europe and the United States, the end of the Cold War laid bare, like a receding tide, other forces that had remained somewhat latent, ignored, repressed, or forgotten, including issues having to do with sexuality, desire, transgression, the bio-cultural nexus, filiation and reproduction, and the scientific management of life from abortion to cloning to euthanasia. While the institutional side of the Enlightenment project remained the common legacy of North Atlantic societies, its imaginary, fantasmatic component, the relationship between sex and death, became a source of new cultural struggles made possible by technological advances. The decision by the French government to ban the Muslim headdress, among other “conspicuous displays” of religious affiliation (signes ostensibles, in French), from public schools fuelled another round of transatlantic feuding. When Jacques Chirac announced his support of the new legislation in December 2003, several editorials in major American newspapers opposed his decision as another instance of France’s disregard for minority rights and religious freedom. The law was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of the French National Assembly and supported by a remarkable consensus of the political class, right and left. This new polemics derived much of its intensity and affective charge from the fact that it brought together secular Reason, the idea of Europe, and a clash of fundamentalisms. An article in the New York Times denied that the ban was motivated by some commitment to secularism. “It is not that at all,” fumed the editorialist. “Banning believers from following the discipline of their religions would amount to imposing the view of the state upon

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them.”3 The Boston Globe faulted the French obsession with using state-sponsored legislation to solve social problems and argued that “Chirac is resorting to intolerant legislation to enforce a rigid conception of tolerance ... His implicit definition of the separation of church and state reflects a cult of statism that is inimical to the American ideal.” Ironically, Jacques Chirac, whom the liberal press had congratulated for his opposition to the Iraq war a year before, was now taken to task for his heavy-handed denial of minority rights. The incompatibility was also foregrounded on the French side. The Stasi Commission, charged in 2003 with providing a comprehensive report to the French president in preparation for the new law, remarked that despite the growing tendency among European countries “to come together on the issue of the separation of the churches and the State ... the difference grows wider between Europe, marked by increased secularization – which does not necessary imply a decline of religions – and the United States, where society is profoundly permeated by religion” (Commission de réflexion 2003, 33). The diversity of churches in colonial America and the absence of a state religion account for the American difference while, as Jean Baubérot has remarked, the French invented their own response to the post-Enlightenment connundrum. The New York Times piece quoted earlier advised the French to look to the American example: “The West embraced the concept of a separation of church and state because every attempt by one religion or ideology to dictate its precepts on others led to only greater problems. The idea was to get the state out of the business of telling people what they should believe or how they could express it. That is what France should do.” The French proponents of banning ostentatious religious dress in public schools begged to differ. In their view, the point was not “to tell people what they should believe” but to prevent proselytizing fanatics from indoctrinating students and to ban “any attempt by one religion or ideology to dictate its precepts to others,” as the Boston Globe had put it. The legislation described ostensible signs of religious affililation as a threat to the peaceful coexistence of ethnic and religious groups in a pluralistic, “colour-blind” society. In the postmodern context of spiritual bricolage in which faith has often become a matter of individual choice and personal taste, fundamentalism represented a premodern theocratic conception that refused to distinguish private beliefs from scripturally sanctioned socio-theological precepts such as sharia law.

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While the new legislation did address some of the tensions in schools, the growing presence of women wearing burkas outside of their homes, which was not prohibited by any law, or, more recently, the controversy surrounding the presence of “Islamic bathing suits” covering a woman’s entire body on French beaches show that it is increasingly challenging for national and local authorities to ban Muslim dress codes from public spaces. Although there was no direct connection between 9/11 and the ban, the latter took place in a context of heightened concern with the threat of Islamist terrorism and the growth of Salafism and Wahabbism in the Muslim world and in Europe. Unsurprisingly, in the most extreme descriptions of religious dress worn by middle-schools girls, the headscarf became a weapon and its wearing a criminal activity. Jacques Chirac declared in Tunisia that “wearing the veil, whether it is intended or not, is a kind of aggression,” while André Glucksmann proclaimed that the veil was “stained in blood” (cited in Scott 2007, 158). In 1948, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book called Reflections on the Jewish Question. Sixty years later, it had become more and more evident to French and non-French critics of the ban that the recurrent affaires du foulard (headscarf controversies) in 1989, 1994, and 2004 went far beyond the visible presence of religion in public education. They were, as Joan Wallach Scott put it in The Politics of the Veil, symptoms of a much broader, and seemingly intractable, Muslim question, “a French problem ... a post-colonial French problem, not a foreign import” (180). The French exception embedded in the polemics was a discursive construct, a fiction, a myth used to hide a multitude of sins, including the fact that “absolutist secularism, undergirded by the idea that the French way of doing gender and sexuality was ‘natural,’ made it impossible to treat Muslim difference as a viable or normal way of being in the world” (181). As Charlotte Nordmann, a philosophy professor and translator of several books by Judith Butler, wrote at the time, “if there is [a problem] of communalism, shouldn’t we look for it on the side of the state? It’s true that the majoritarian character of that communalism allows it to deny that fact and instead to pose as ... the universal” (cited in Scott 2007, 181). Far from being anti-communitarian, the myth of universalism only valued one type of communal belonging, that of the national compact. In its most extreme versions, the anticlerical secularism that undergirds it can take the form of an institutionally “fundamentalist” rejection of all minoritarian identities, religious,

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racial, sexual, or otherwise, as a potential or actual threat to the indivisibility of the nation, defined as a demand for sameness. These anxieties about homogeneity were replicated during the entire decade of 2000–10 as gradually more visible and vocal social movements focused on racism and racial inequalities, gender parity, harassment and sexual violence, gay rights, and other “minority” issues came to the forefront of the political and ideological scene in France.4 The headscarf controversy was obviously highly gendered in nature: girls, not boys, were told how to dress and not to dress in the classroom, and the “veiling” of the female body demanded by tradition if not by scriptures (a point of contention among clerics and theologians), with its attendant denial of sexual freedom and femininity, were a major cause of the uproar. While many French feminists denounced the oppression of women encoded in sharia law, gender studies scholars such as Joan Wallach Scott took them to task for idealizing the nation, objectifying Muslims as part of a fixed culture, and mythologizing their own country as an unchanged, enduring republic, as if all these dimensions of Frenchness stood “outside of history – antagonists locked in eternal combat” (Scott 2007, 7). Scott concluded The Politics of the Veil with critical comments on one of Caroline Fourest’s essays on Islam, La tentation obscurantiste, which had been awarded the prize for the best book about politics by the French National Assembly in 2006. Scott met Fourest and Fianneta Venner, co-founders of the feminist journal Pro-choix, in New York as the two were investigating the international networks of evangelical Christians based in the United States, evidence that they were concerned with all forms of religious extremism, not just the Islamic kind, an excellent segue to the main topic of this chapter, which deals with French evangelicals, rather than Muslims, as largely unwilling participants in the post-9/11 wars of religion. Scott recalled Fourest saying that “the veil is not a debate in itself. It is a test which ought to allow us to affirm a particularly ambitious vision of laïcité at a moment when it is more threatened than ever by the rise of fundamentalisms” (176). The statement itself is indicative that the republican agenda born of the first headscarf controversy in 1989, of which Fourest quickly became one of the most visible exponent, was more than a simple reaffirmation of the unchanging principles of the French national legacy; it was an opportunity to bind, repair, and regenerate a society that many, and not only on the right, saw as mired in deca-

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dence (a pessimistic view of the country’s present and future thematized in the media and intellectual discourse as sinistrose and déclinisme).5 As such, Fourest’s call for an “ambitious vision of laïcité” was decidely neo-republican, an attempt to breathe life into the national heritage by remembering while redefining its historical components and adapting them to the challenges of the new times produced by globalization, the increased circulation of peoples, and the supposed return of pre-modern, pre-Enlightenment regimes of belief. The European Islam born of the diasporic circulation of beliefs is not a ghost from the past, a throwback to medieval times, as many of its opponents view it; it is more anti-modern than pre-modern. A reaction to the cultural disruptions and spatial dislocations produced by globalization, it is always already modern, despite its anti-Western and anti-Enlightenment rhetoric. Like odd-shaped pieces left over from a discarded puzzle, theocratic claims are hard to fit in the cultural regimes that have been called, perhaps for want of better words, postmodernity, late modernity, or, more recently, “the contemporary.” For all practical purposes, sectarian fundamentalism remains for many people the excessive remainder, the unassimilable Other of postChristian Europe, although the organizations the 2003 Stasi Commission report called “organized politico-religious pressure groups that are testing the limits of resistance of the Republic” (Commission de réflexion 2003, 43) have for the most part advanced their political project within the democratic public space, mobilizing their supporters in peaceful, legal demonstrations and demanding that the State acknowledge their constitutional rights to the free exercise of their religion. Culturalist views always run the risk of naturalizing and totalizing transnational differences, of folding them back onto substantive national or regional identities (“France,” “Europe,” “America”). The ideological faultlines framing the debates on the Enlightenment legacy vs the trope of “the return of religion” cut across the spaces that make up the transatlantic world while taking specific forms in specific contexts. Cultural and religious forms are not given; they are constructed and constantly re-elaborated and must be explained by history, not the other way around. A careful historicizing shows that they are subject to a perpetual movement of redefinition, reformulation, and rearticulation. Although Islam has remained the major focus of the cultural politics of 9/11, the much lesser known story of the French evangelicals’ American legacy deserves to be told.

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THE

“ BUSH

SECT ” ON THE ATTACK

In the post-9/11 context, the discourse on the unsurpassable incompatibilities among Western nations parallels the narrative of the clash of the great universalist religions. In February of 2004, a year into the Iraq war, Le Nouvel Observateur published a nine-page special report entitled “Les Évangéliques, la secte qui veut conquérir le monde” (Evangelicals: The Sect That Wants to Conquer the World). The front page of the magazine showed a photograph of George W. Bush standing against the backdrop of a large black cross and the dark outline of what looked like a church congregation. The dossier comprised several reports, including a lead article on the close ties between the president and the Christian Right, a piece on an evangelical university in Virginia, an extensive story on the spectacular rise of born-again Christianity in Brazil, and a shorter account of the state of evangelicalism in France in the context of an explosion of conservative Protestantism worldwide. In order to alert the readers to the threat of a religious movement they might not know much about, the dossier combined statistical data, comments on US religious history and contemporary politics, quotes from scholarly studies, and bons mots (George W. Bush, for example, was described as suffering, like most of his coreligionists, from “a genuine itch to proselytize”). The labelling of evangelicals as “the crusaders of the Apocalypse” explicitly linked past military conflicts between medieval Christendom and the Muslim world with the belief of 500 million people in Armadeggon, “the final and upcoming battle between the forces of good and evil.” The phrase echoed both Ronald Reagan’s labelling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” (1983) and George W. Bush’s own “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea) mentioned in his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002. The new version of the axis, to which Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton would later add Cuba, Libya, and Syria, mixed authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world with the last bastions of godless materialism in Asia and Latin America. Since George W. Bush shared with the religious right and some of his consiglieri an extreme messianic vision of the world and its future, Le Nouvel Observateur wondered what could “be done against a man who has a direct line to the Almighty? Who thinks of himself as invested with a divine mission? Who believes the Apocalypse is imminent? What can you say when that man is the President of the United

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States?” The special issue also addressed the tension between France and the United States regarding the Iraq war a year before, alluding to a meeting during which the American president had baffled Jacques Chirac with an allusion to the biblical figures of Gog and Magog, the enemies to be defeated by the Messiah in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and the New Testament Book of Revelation. The French president, who was raised as a Catholic, was apparently unfamiliar with these eschatological stories and reportedly asked one of his aides to check the reference with the Protestant Federation of France. The dossier devoted substantial coverage to proselytizing activities in the Middle East and the Islamic world, from missionary efforts to convert Muslims to Christianity in Africa and Southwest Asia and active political and financial support of armed intervention against Islamist groups in northern Nigeria to the establishment of Jewish colonies in the West Bank by prominent church leaders. The semantic register combined past and present, including mentions of the New Jerusalem of the Puritans and the contemporay United States as the Zion of the New World. The section on Protestants in Brazil noted that Muslim fundamentalists also prophetized their own (reversed) version of Armageddon, the ultimate battle between the mosque and the synagogue in the Israeli city of Lod that would usher in the return of the Mahdi, Islam’s Messiah and the reign of Allah’s justice on earth. One article noted that the growing Islamization of France was not absent from the global concerns of evangelicals. Well aware that he was addressing a French audience, a pastor from the Virginia religious college featured in the magazine issued a dire warning: “The Muslims are waging the great battle of modern times. They kill Christians in the entire world and are extremely prolific. Wait till you see what happens to France in ten years.” Meanwhile, secularist France was accused by several interviewees of limiting religious freedom just like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China. An insert entitled “In the Land of laïcité, Neo-Christians Are Interested in Muslims” related the growing influence of evangelicalism in France on major issues of the day, including the debate on the Islamic veil and the role of ethno-religious communitarianism in the country. Muslims were described as the preferred targets of evangelical conversion campaigns because of their “moral seriousness and desire to submit to God.” A quote from an article in the Protestant Revue Réformée predicted an alliance between evangelical Christians and Muslims in order to address issues of sexual morality raised by the growing liberalization of French society,

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notably the civil solidarity pact (PACS), a contractual form of civil union voted by the French parliament in 1999 and designed to offer some measure of legal recognition to non-married heterosexual and same-sex couples. It was clear that the plan of the Bush sect to take over the world would not sidestep the land of Voltaire. The special report was part of a series of previous and subsequent issues devoted to the United States and the war on terror, including a set of articles on “The America We Love” (that of Michael Moore, not neoconservatives), a critical review of Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of Christ (“evangelicals love it, Jews say it is anti-Semitic”), and, the following month, al-Qaeda’s terrorist attack in Madrid. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

It is no surprise that many French evangelicals took exception to the way they were portrayed in the media. The Nouvel Observateur issue led to a swift rebuke from the leaders of major churches and associations, including the Evangelical Federation of France, the National Union of God’s Assemblies, the French Evangelical Alliance, and the National Union of Independent Evangelical Reformed Churches. The magazine Christianisme Aujourd’hui (Christianity Today) devoted parts of its April and May 2004 issues to the controversy, summing up the major objections from collective press releases and individual statements amounting to what was described as hundreds of letters to the editor and thousands of emails on social media. Criticisms ranged from the number of inaccuracies showing widespread ignorance of the history of Reformed churches on both sides of the Atlantic to “shameful amalgamations” between the evangelical movement and “apocalyptic sects such as the Order of the Solar Temple, the Japanese sect Aum or the Islamic Wahhabist sect Al-Qaeda.” Several of the public statements published at the time also argued that the majority of French evangelicals had condemned the war in Iraq and readily complied with the 1905 law on the separation of church and state governing the establishment of religious associations in France, including the required abstention from any form of political activity. The Evangelical Alliance of France added “its voice to that of all Christians who, in France and in the world, call for a peaceful, if at all possible, solution to the Iraqi crisis.” Critics also pointed to the unfortunate effects of the stigmatization of Protestantism, the “third religion in France” after Catholicism and

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Islam, with almost one million members, a third of them evangelicals (350,000), and wondered whether the point of the article was to “revive religious wars” in the country. Another press release concurred: “Following the debate on laïcité, the climate in France is tense enough without having a newpaper such as Le Nouvel Observateur gloss over some essential differences beween French and American Evangelicals,” i.e., the highly messianic nature of the American brand as well as extremist minoritarian views the press had unfairly exaggerated. Respondents pointed out, among various inaccuracies, that neither George W. Bush (a Methodist) nor the “evangelist” Billy Graham were evangelicals, that born-again Protestants could be found in several other denominations, and that former President Jimmy Carter, whose political views could harldy be equated to those of his successor in the White House, was not an evangelical but a Baptist. One letter to the editor mentioned the “origin” of one of the contributors to the dossier, Slimane Zeghidour, his usual coverage of topics related to Islam, and questioned his familiarity with Christianity, while alluding to his display of “primary anti-Americanism.” Another detractor of Zeghidour’s article remarked that if it would be unfair to reduce Islam to its fundamentalist versions (intégrisme, in French), then Protestants should be given the same consideration.6 Members of other faith communities, scholars of religion, and Internet contributors soon entered the fray to denounce the ideological bias of the media. David Roure, a Roman Catholic priest, lamented the fact that the piece showed a deep misunderstanding of its subject matter, stating that “all French evangelicals are not unconditional fans of Georges Bush [sic] or his politics.”7 Info-sectes, a website devoted to “sects and movements of thought,” stated that “the evangelical movement was not a sect ... but the majoritarian fraction of Protestantism worldwide (about 60%),” while acknowledging that “some marginal groups may nevertheless become sects.” A press review of the controversy on a self-professed atheistic site (athéisme.free.fr) concuded that Le Nouvel Observateur had “almost made our Catholic or Muslim neighbors appear pale and harmless next to the Evangelicals. Meanwhile, France is concerned with students wearing the veil in school and seems to live on another planet.” The site wondered whether the criticism had not been pushed too far “in order to better cry wolf, and awaken, by way of a kind of electroshock, the proselytism of ‘sleepy’ Catholics,” as if the magazine was in fact working on the Church’s behalf.8 The Evangelical Federation

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of France claimed that the majority of its co-religionists had condemned the war in Iraq, and Elizabeth Loussaut-Gallais, a sociologist of religion, was quoted in support of the diversity of their political views: “French Protestants (and often Evangelicals) are generally on the left. This is far from Bush’s politics” (cited in Denimal 2004). Le Nouvel Observateur’s dossier provides an opportunity to test some of the media coverage against academic studies subsequently published in France and the United States, with a focus on four major thematic categories: 1) the extent to which George W. Bush’s religious beliefs could be qualified as evangelical, thereby justifying the “Bush sect” label; 2) the messianic and proselytic nature of American Protestantism as distinct from its French counterpart; 3) the distinct political views of French and American evangelicals regarding the Iraq war; and 4) how much early twenty-first-century French evangelical churches owed to the American missionaries who contributed to their development after 1945. Before we examine these various points, a few remarks on the history of evangelical Protestantismin in the United States might provide some context to the burdensome American legacy of French evangelicals. THE FLAG AND THE CROSS

In many ways, the separation of the new Republic from the British Motherland turned the North Atlantic into a buffer rather than a conduit as national politics prevailed over cultural and religious filiation, nativizing, as it were, the European legacy. The colonial context had presided over the flow of people and material or symbolic goods to the American continent. Some of the ideologies born of the Enlightenment, whether democratic, revolutionary, or nationalistic, had played a major role in the independence of the English and Spanish colonies. The gradual sundering of the new nation’s direct ties to the previous colonial power promoted the rise of homegrown American beliefs, values, and practices to a degree unknown in the Canadian provinces that had largely remained, as part of the British empire, within the orbit of old world political and religious institutions. The gradual disappearance of rationalistic Deism in the United States, and the passing of the Europeanized patrician elite of the Founding Fathers who had led the uprising against Britain and crafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, removed many obstacles to the rise of populist, emotional, irrational forms of spi-

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rituality. In his classic study of the genesis of anti-intellectualism in American life, written as a reaction to Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade, Richard Hofstadter noted that “as evangelicals made increasingly impressive gains from 1795 to 1835, and as Deism lapsed into relative quiescence, the battle between pietism and rationalism fell into the background. There was much more concern among evangelicals with rescuing the vast American interior from the twin evils of Romanism and religious apathy than there was with dispelling the rather faint afterglow of the Enlightenment” (Hofstadter 1962, 121). When the Great Awakening of the 1790s swept across the frontier settlements, the American experiment was still a largely unfinished project. The young Republic lacked a country-wide educational policy aimed at instilling in the youth the ideas, values, and emotions on which to build a national identity. There did not exist in the former colony a centralized, state-run school system of the kind that was being set up in western Europe in the wake of the liberal-democratic revolutions. In the absence of a national ideology produced by state schools and state churches, the pioneers’ specific brand of Christianity became the basis for America’s first imagined community. One cannot overstate the scope and power of the evangelical tidal wave that swept through the American frontier after the War of Independence. By the mid nineteenth century, more than two-thirds of all Protestant communicants were Methodists and Baptists. American Methodism grew from a little sect of some 3,000 members in 1775 to the largest Protestant denomination, with more than a million and a half members eighty years later. In addition, there were 1.1 million Baptists and half a million Presbyterians in 1855 but only 100,000 Episcopalians, all that was left of Old World, high-church establishment Protestantism. The cultural evangelization of the continent that became the allconsuming mission of the sectarian denominations mixed patriotic fervor with spiritual enthusiasm and became an important part of the distinctly American process of nation-building in the absence of a powerful centralized state and fixed borders to the west and south. European visitors were both puzzled and irritated by the moralistic, millenarian tone of American national pride. In his American Notes, Rudyard Kipling remarked that when a “perfectly unknown man attacked me and asked me what I thought of American patriotism, I said there was nothing like it in the old country. Always tell an American this. It soothes him.” Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun did not share Kipling’s gently patronizing humour. “It is incredible how

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naïvely cocksure Americans are in their belief that they can whip any enemy whatsoever,” he lamented. “There is no end to their patriotism; it is a patriotism that never flinches, and it is just as loudmouthed as it is vehement.”9 The stridency of what he called “the national vanity of the Americans” provoked even the impatience of Tocqueville: “If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, ‘Ay,’ he replies, ‘there is not its equal in the world.’ If I applaud the freedom that its inhabitants enjoy, he answers: ‘Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.’ If I remark on the purity of morals that distinguishes the United States, ‘I can imagine,’ says he, ‘that a stranger, who has witnessed the corruption that prevails in other nations, would be astonished at the difference’ ... It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome, more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it”(Tocqueville 2000, 11, 236). By the beginning of the twentieth-century, the historical alliance between evangelical faith and populist democracy, which had been instrumental for progressive causes such as abolitionism, had come to an end. The fundamentalists’ revolt against modernity gave rise to what Hofstadter, writing in reaction to McCarthyism, called “the onehundred percent mentality” championed by the influential Baptist preacher Billy Sunday (1862–1935). “The fundamentalism of the cross” Hofstadter wrote, “was now supplemented by the fundamentalism of the flag” as the belief of biblical orthodoxy had become the pattern of militant nationalism (Hofstadter 1962, 133). A century later, the Kulturkampf of Protestant fundamentalism provided the background of the campaign against “the Bush sect” in French media. Meanwhile, the cultural divide that had emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century, pitting the Christian Right against liberal secularism, still sets the parameters of the current culture wars in America, with 80 per cent of white evangelicals voting for Donald Trump in 2016.10 GEORGE W . BUSH : METHODIST OR BORN - AG AIN ?

The growing interest in the status of evangelical churches, both worldwide and at home, following the invasion of Iraq was undoubtedly triggered by the Bible-centred rhetoric of the new commander in chief, whom ethicist Peter Singer called America’s most prominent moralist. As mentioned earlier, the spate of articles and books devoted to “Bush’s religion” in the United States spilled over to the French-

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speaking market through timely translations of academic and journalistic studies on the religious right, Christian fundamentalism, and the evangelical vote in the 2004 US presidential elections. Many accounts of Bush’s brand of “apocalyptic Christianity” (Singer) recycled a handful of quotes and anecdotes borrowed from his speeches and memoir, A Charge to Keep, published immediately before the 2000 presidential campaign. In the book, the candidate described a lifechanging walk with evangelist Billy Graham along a beach in Maine and his subsequent decision to “recommit [his] heart to Jesus Christ,” having been “humbled to learn [from Graham] that God had sent his Son to die for a sinner like me” (Bush 1999, 136). When asked in a presidential candidate forum in 1999 to name his favorite philosopher, Bush famously responded, “Christ, because he changed my heart” (Rozell and Whitney 2007, 1). On several occasions during the 2000 presidential campaign, he told the media the story of his errant and sinful youth, his rebelliousness, alcoholism, and subsequent decision to join a Bible study group, a conversion narrative that fit squarely with evangelical practices of “witnessing” and “sinner’s prayer.” The first term refers to the public ritual of asking recent converts to testify to their new relationship with the divine through sharing with the audience the story of their personal encounter with “the living Christ.” The sinner’s prayer is an act of repentance, also public, by which the new members of the congregation ask Jesus to forgive their sins, acknowledge him as Saviour, and submit their lives to God’s lordship (Reimer 2003, 43). The often quoted “Bebbington quadrilateral” defines the four basic components of the fundamentalist doctrine as follows: biblicism, which asserts the ultimate authority of the Bible; activism, or the importance of evangelism and religious involvement; conversionism, which stresses the experience of being “born again”; and crucicentrism, or the centrality of Christ’s (atoning) work on the cross (Bebbington 1989). In addition, the evangelical brand of Protestantism, broadly defined to include Fundamentalists and Pentecostals, generally combines highly emotional and intensely personal elements. As Max Weber pointed out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, there always needs to be, for the true disciple and her community, behavioural evidence of salvation (Reimer 2003, 45). Raised in mainstream Protestant churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), Bush had joined the United Methodist Church to marry Laura Welch in 1977, almost a decade before his born-again experi-

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ence of 1985 at the age of forty. According to a piece published a few days before his inauguration in January 2001, the new president was “at odds with official Methodist policy on a number of issues, from abortion – the church calls it a ‘regrettable option’ – to affirmative action to an expanded missile defense system and gays in the military.”11 But he was said to disagree equally with many in the evangelical community on gays in the church or making Roe v. Wade unconstitutional. As John Green, co-author of Religion and the Culture Wars, put it a few years into his first term, “President Bush is unwilling to commit himself to a constitutional amendment to abolish abortions, which evangelicals would really like to see ... So, on a variety of issues, he contradicts both the mainline Protestant position and the evangelical Protestant position.”12 THE PRESIDENT AND THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

The characteristic melding of “God and Country” in George Bush’s speeches was undeniable, as when he stated that the right to life “cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the creator of life” or when he used biblical language to urge funding for his HIV/AIDS initiative: “When we see the wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not – pass to the other side of the road” (Singer 2004, 105, 106). The same could be said of foreign policy: “When ... in February 2003, Bush said that liberty for the people of Iraq would not be a gift that the United States could provide, but rather, ‘God’s gift to every human being in the world,’ he seemed to be suggesting that there was divine endorsement for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein” (208). According to Singer, David Frum, one of the president’s speechwriters, “has given an account of how Bush came to use the phrase ‘axis of evil’ to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. In his initial draft, he compared America’s enemies today with those in World War II and referred to them as the ‘axis of hatred,’ but Michael Gerson, who had overall responsibility for the speech and is an evangelical Christian, changed ‘hatred’ to ‘evil’ because ‘he wanted to use the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11.’ Despite being criticized, especially in Europe, for introducing such a heavily moralistic language into international relations, Bush used it again and again until, in Frum’s words, it ‘ceased to be a speechwriter’s phrase and became his own’” (208). The implication here is that there was

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such a close symbiosis between the semantic worlds of the president and his Christian conservative entourage that speechwriters could borrow from his own lexicology to come up with a formulation that would then become a staple of subsequent discourses. Given the religious ethos pervading American culture, several recent US presidents have made no secret of their personal faith, even among Democrats, including Carter, Clinton, and Obama. None, however, so directly and closely patterned their politics after specific theological views as George W. Bush, deliberately blurring the line between (profane) public policy and (sacred) private beliefs. And yet, some analysts have claimed that although he championed several causes dear to Christian conservatives, including opposition to lateterm abortion rights and embryonic stem-cell research and support for faith-based initiatives and a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, he was not simply the candidate of the Religious Right. Political scientists John W. Wells and David B. Cohen, for example, have argued in light of the 2004 re-election campaign that “in one domestic issue area after another, the Bush White House has sought to carve out a unique center-right solution that appeals to social conservatives without alienating his more secular constituency ... To date, Bush’s center-right strategy has allowed him to successfully spread the political gospel while not becoming a casualty of the culture wars” (Wells and Cohen 2007, 130, 149). Was George W. Bush simply the spokesman for the Christian Coalition, or was he also an astute politician, who used his personal faith and the narrative of his spiritual rebirth to carry the evangelical vote? Many of his critics dismissed him as a simple man, if not a simpleton, a figurehead manufactured and manipulated by a gifted group of media-savvy neoconservative and Christian Right spin-doctors and image-makers that carried him through eight years in the Oval Office. A couple of examples might complicate this widely held perception of the US president as the not-so-bright puppet of a particularly gifted communications team. Speaking to a White House conference on faith-based and community initiatives in Philadelphia on 12 December 2002, “Dubbya,” as he was referred to by his supporters and opponents alike, acknowledged that “government has no business endorsing a religious creed, or directly funding religious worship or religious teaching.” Was Bush expressing his most deeply held conviction when he approved the constitutionally sanctioned separation of church and state or, on the other hand, when he signed the Partial

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Birth Abortion Ban Act, arguing, as previously mentioned, that the right to terminate a pregnancy “cannot be granted or denied by government because it does not come from government, it comes from the creator of life,” echoing the Declaration of Independence’s statement that human beings “are endowed by their Creator” (i.e., not by their government) “of certain unalienable rights”? (Singer 2004, 90, 105). As John W. Wells and David B. Cohen have argued, Bush proved to be as skilled a politician as Bill Clinton, whose famous triangulation approach in the mid-1990s had enabled him “to resurrect his moribund presidency by placing himself between the conservatives of the 104th Congress and his liberal base. While defending the goals of traditional liberal constituencies, Clinton was able, at the same time, to distance himself from the more ideological elements of his coalition and fashion a centre-left position in American politics” (Wells and Cohen 2007, 130). Bush knew that if a Republican candidate could not be elected without the Christian conservative vote, it was also true that the White House could not be won solely with their support. He also clearly understood a basic feature of the complex relationship between religion and politics in the United States, i.e., “the continuing willingness of the American people to respond to religious appeals as long as they appear as manifestations of a middle-of-theroad civil religion and not the agenda of the theological fringe” (148). Bush was a self-described born-again Christian, but there is no evidence that he shared either an allergy to the separation of church and state or an intolerance of all beliefs other than his own. He campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” emphasizing, as Mark Rozell and G. Whitney noted, “social conservative views couched in the liberal rhetoric of ... tolerance” (2007, 12). After September 11, he took pains to distinguish Islamist ideology from the Muslim faith and steered clear of the most incendiary statements of some evangelical leaders against Islam. Was the French media, then, justified in referring to evangelicals as “the Bush Sect”? The label rested on two assumptions: that all evangelicals agreed with one another and that Bush agreed with all of them. APOCALYPTIC CHRISTIANIT Y AS FOREIGN POLICY

According to Sébastien Fath’s study of “Les églises évangéliques américaines et la guerre au Moyen-Orient” (American Evangelical Churches

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and the War in the Middle East), the view that American evangelical organizations have played a major role in the war on terror, making US policy in the Muslim world nothing but a Christian version of jihad, was massively dominant in the European media, especially in France. “The stakes of the war,” Régis Debray wrote in the New York Times in early 2003, “are spiritual. Europe defends a secular vision of the world. It does not separate matters of urgency from long-term considerations. The United States compensates for its shortsightedness, its tendency to improvise, with an altogether biblical self-assurance in its transcendent destiny. Puritan America is hostage to a sacred morality; it regards itself as the predestined repository of Good, with a mission to strike down Evil. Trusting in Providence, it pursues a politics that is at bottom theological and as old as Pope Gregory VII.”13 There is plenty of evidence that a majority of Christian conservatives not only supported George W. Bush’s domestic agenda but also shared his firm interventionist world view. A 2003 Pew survey revealed the extent to which, as Kevin den Dulk has put it, the Christian Right was “remarkably receptive to an active U.S. foreign policy” (2007, 216). Eighty-six per cent of surveyed evangelicals responded that it ought to be guided by moral principles, 62 per cent that it needed to be “compassionate,” and 55 per cent that it should be shaped by religion, all numbers significantly higher than those of any other group polled in the survey (217). Sixty to 70 per cent of white evangelicals also agreed that the United States ought to play a special role in the world and 44 per cent that they should act unilaterally if needed in order to keep the peace (216). The support for the war, however, was far from unanimous. One third of those polled at the time had reservations, a number of leaders opposed the invasion, and there was even some measure of “embarrassment” (to use Fath’s word) among the majority of churches and movements who saw the occupation of Iraq as a combination of just war, patriotic duty, and regime change in dictatorial states. The invasion of Iraq openly militarized the churches’ long-running “soft war” with Islam since the 1960s. Fath identified three major components in the spiritual and geopolitical “battle for the souls” of the Arab world: Christian Zionism and the support for Israel; the defence of religious freedom and its attendant proselytism; and sociocultural democratization and economic development via the empowerment of civil society. The quest for potential converts took several forms, from the deployment of numerical media (Internet, satellite

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broadcasting, television channels in Arabic) to door-to-door campaigns of evangelization often based on social services (alphabetization, help with schooling, etc.) among local communities. Predictably, political authorities and religious leaders in many countries where Islam is the state religion have been concerned with Christian proselytizing, which led to hostility toward the missionaries and the new converts hindered in their religious practices, discriminated against, and sometimes jailed. The expansionist designs of American churches were brought closer to France by way of the growing presence of evangelical activities in North Africa, notably in Algeria, where many French Muslims originally came from, as well as in France, where their descendants reside. As a result, the binary conflict between the secular left and French evangelicals following the Iraq war has since acquired a third dimension: the Maghreb and the banlieues as mission territory. The media have relayed over time the results of several scholarly studies on the subject, perhaps projecting onto the other side of the Mediterranean some of the national concerns first articulated at the start of the Iraq war. While the Algerian and Moroccan governments have mostly tolerated the Catholic presence, in large part because it caters to immigrants and expatriates, the rapid growth of Baptists and Pentecostals has been met with increased repression, especially since the vast majority of neo-Christians are found among non-Arab Berber and Kabyle populations who have long voiced identitarian claims and grievances. In addition to complicating the ethnically fraught divisions, the surge in conversions has also fuelled political tensions with the Islamist opposition, who accuse the government of undermining sharia law by tolerating Christian minorities. A scholarly essay published in 2014 mentioned that “the crime of proselytism toward Muslims was punished with three years in jail in Morocco and five years in Algeria, forcing Protestants to meet in secret, which in turn makes it difficult to assess their real number, estimated at 80,000 in Morocco and between 50,000 and 100,000 in Algeria,” which remains officially a secular republic.14 SODOM ON THE SEINE

Painting French evangelicals with the same brush as their American counterparts was all the easier for their 2004 critics in that missionaries from the United States had played a crucial role in redefining the

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role, scope, and meaning of evangelization in France for sixty years. They first arrived in 1945, sponsored by an organization called TEAM (The Evangelical Alliance Mission), as part of an intense effort to spread Christianity worldwide in the fight against godless totalitarianism. Founded in 1890 by the Reverend Fredrik Franson, the agency had pioneered missionary work in China, Japan, India, South Africa, and Latin America before turning to Europe after the liberation of the continent from the Nazis. France proved to be a particularly challenging site for evangelization; initial efforts at “church-planting” largely failed until the mid-1960s, and the country soon developed a reputation as a “missionary graveyard.” In his book on American Evangelical Missionaries in France 1945–1975, Allen V. Koop listed a variety of reasons for the inability of the TEAM representatives, so successful in other parts of the world, to make a dent in the combined secularism, individualism, and anti-clericalism of the French. Often married with children, with a rudimentary knowledge of the language and history of their new terre de mission, the newcomers rarely overcame their isolation from the people they were so eager to bring to salvation through Jesus Christ but who kept rejecting them as part of a new form of American invasion. Communication barriers, both linguistic and cultural, proved insurmontable: the visitors spoke with a heavy accent, did not drink wine or alcohol, and addressed their audience with ready-made imported sermons in which they quoted unknown fundamentalist theologians in characteristically emotional style. Evangelical missions failed to attract a substantial and lasting community and were still referred to as “the American church” after several years of existence. A “culturally sensitive veteran” quoted by Koop reported with sadness that once the initial cultural shock was over, missionary confidence in ever becoming French “was inversely proportional to the years spent” in the country (Koop 1986, 140). The disappointed TEAM members rationalized their failure through culturalist lenses: the French were simply unfit for Christianization in view of the mixture of atheism, communism, and “mysticism” that held them in its grip. The urban sections of the country were “basically pagan” (22), and the people were chronically “distracted from Christianity by being bogged down ... in unsolvable political problems” (34). A contributor to the New York Herald Tribune (28 June 1968) named Mary Blume provided the readers with statistics explaining why it was impossible to bring Christ to “Sodom on the Seine.” “In Paris,” she wrote, “there is one priest for every 5,000 inhabitants,

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one doctor for every 514, and one fortune teller for every 120. France has 34,000 full-time astrologers compared to 6,000 in the United States ... This mysticism is indeed suprising, but it is only the symptom of the hunger and searching of a nation without God ... a nation which desperately needs God” but was hellbent, literally, on never receiving Him (64). In countless letters and articles from the land of the occult, active and former missionaries alike reported these widespread pagan practices to their leaders and co-religionists at home and around the world and ascribed their frustrating lack of progress “to the power of the satanic opposition to the gospel in France” (13). The French were simply too different: as one letter writer put it, “we live in a world of absolutes and they do not” (158). According to Koop, American evangelicals were used to making many converts among Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans, but they were ill-prepared to face the depth of the hostility to conversion campaigns in a country such as France, whose culture had been fashioned by ten centuries of Catholic enculturation followed by two hundred years of radical critique of the Church by post-Enlightenment skeptics, aristocratic libertines, Voltairian free thinkers, and communist atheists. To the French, the gospel was old news rather than good news, and the newcomers’ boisterous, assertive, intrusive, and moralistic style of preaching was less than endearing. “The French people, almost to a man,” complained a frustrated missionary, “are convinced that they know all about Christianity ... They think they know the gospel – that is why the evangelization of France is so difficult” (143). The TEAM representatives not only had to face the combined rejection of miscreants and hostility of the Catholic faithful, they also had to contend with the distrust of other Protestants, including some of their evangelical brethren. As born-again conservatives, they viewed mainline Protestantism abroad as critically as they did at home, and many of them shared with Arthur Johnston, one of their most visible leaders, the view that “historically ingrown French Protestantism, blinded by false ecumenism, had failed to reach the masses with the Gospel” (76). Many French Lutherans and Reformed Church members had an equally jaundiced view of radical Christianity from the other side of the Atlantic, in part because their pastors feared that “some sheep would be stolen from their already tiny flocks” (78). French Protestants from liberal and progressive circles made a point of distinguishing themselves from the religious right for political and

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theological reasons as well as moral ones because they feared being associated with the highly publicized financial and sexual scandals discrediting prominent televangelists in the United States. The American missionaries even failed to make common cause with their French counterparts, a minority of Protestants who had been present in the country since the nineteenth century following an earlier wave of evangelization from England. Again, numbers are hard to come by, but according to Koop, “coordinators for the Billy Graham Crusades in Paris made reference to 20,000 Parisian evangelicals out of a total French evangelicals community of 50,000 to 60,000. Later estimates made by American missionaries and French evangelicals arrived at a figure of 79,000” (25). Because of their long history of resistance and survival, homegrown evangelicals often resented their wealthy, more entrepreneurial co-religionists for a variety of reasons, including cultural misunderstandings, theological differences, and even “petty squabbling that kept Baptists in France, French and Americans, from close cooperation” (25). The natives blamed a lack of cooperation and consultation from the representatives of the US-led Youth For Christ movement for their failure to attract more converts, citing their “naiveté, insensitivity, and even arrogance” (29). Allen V. Koop concluded that despite their inauspicious start in the forties and fifties, evangelical missions in France achieved a modicum of success in the following decades. While many pastors had come to realize that “the evangelization of France was not going to be achieved by turning Frenchmen into Americans,” (142), the movement eventually went native, nationalized its clergy, liturgies, and publications, and grew to become a noticeable force in the country, reaching the respectable number of 350,000 churchgoers by the time George W. Bush took on the axis of evil. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

Billy Graham paid several visits to “Sodom on the Seine” in a fortyyear period after Jacques Blocher, a French evangelical pastor trained in an American seminary in Minnesota, first invited the young evangelist to France in 1946–47 to promote Youth For Christ in a rather confidential series of events with limited press coverage. His second visit on 30 June 1954 drew considerably more attention, as the now well-known preacher met with 2,700 pastors from France, Belgium,

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and Switzerland at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, only to return the following summer for a five-day show at the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium that attracted 8,000 people every evening and led to 2,000 “decisions” by members of the audience to come up on stage and state their desire to change their lives by following Jesus. During another decade, the now religious superstar would gather a crowd of 45,000 at the Palais Omnisport of Bercy, with thousands more during a fifteen-day tour of major cities in May 1963. In his article on the reception of Billy Graham in France, Sébastien Fath notes that by the 1980s, French evangelicals reached “a critical mass,” with an estimated 200,000 faithful. One hundred thousand people returned to the Bercy Arena in 1986 for another week-long event, while another 200,000 across the country watched Graham in person or on giant screens broadcasting his image via satellite. This time, the American predicant met with socialist President François Mitterrand.15 The reactions of journalists and representatives of other religions to Graham’s highly mediatized homilies during his various visits prefigured the controversies surrounding the politics of evangelicalism after 9/11, giving rise to similar comments and criticisms. The size of the attendance at the rallies and the use of modern mass communication techniques to spread the message led to derisive talk of “religious salesmanship” and ironic descriptions of the preacher as “better than Johnny” (Halliday, the most popular rock star in the country). Leftist publications, including L’Humanité (the communist daily), Libération, and the satirical Le Canard enchaîné, mixed anti-American and anticlerical allusions to the “PT Barnum of conversion,” “Buffalo Bill Circus,” “the Hollywood preacher and his evangelical commando,” “the pin-up boy of the Gospel,” and “the atomic evangelizer.” A June 1955 article in Le Canard enchaîné ridiculed Graham as a “fisher of money,” not of men, summarizing his preaching as “childish pabulum, stupidities that the lowest of country priest would not dare serve to his parishioners” (Fath 2004, 84–5, 89–92). Roland Barthes himself devoted one of his ground-breaking semiotic analyses in Mythologies (1957) to the phenomenon, reserving his most trenchant piece of cultural critique for a “McCarthyist episode” involving an “archangel Gabriel in a trenchcoat” bent on selling the Bible like bars of soap” (Barthes 2012). Fath noted that the religious press, although generally not as dismissive as its secular counterpart, was not swayed by the evangelist’s imported methods and message that Catholic commentators described as “exotic,” stressing the non-clerical, deterritorialized, untra-

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ditional, individualistic, emotive, and strictly biblicist nature of a religious revival that lacked any ecclesiatical, dogmatic, or sacramental foundation. A 1955 article in France Catholique emphasized the Americanness of the preacher’s appearance and demeanour, closer to the habitus of a wealthy athlete or movie actor than to a man of the cloth: “Ah! He is nice, this Billy, as splendid as an archangel and as sun-tanned as a vacationer. With a touch of waterskiing, horse-meat steack [sic] with rasberry [sic] sauce, and a round of golf in Honolulu.” A decade later, François Mauriac, the prominent Catholic novelist, shared his acerbic impressions of “the charming pastor” with the educated, conservative, traditionalist readership of Le Figaro littéraire: “We see him in action in a French provincial town. How I wish I could interview those hallucinated women approaching the stage! For, after all, we are in a catholic country, and they had to attend catechism. How can one prefer this kind of illuminism to our old Mother Church?” Even fellow Protestants had reservations about Graham’s businesslike, electronic style of evangelization. Liberals and progressives distanced themselves from what they perceived as a form of unwelcome aggression, disconnected from local religious milieus, contexts, and traditions, “from French history and their conception of a ‘modern’ faith,” as Fath put it. Strict adherence to the privacy of religious beliefs in the republican tradition, a solid allergy to militant religiosity in the public sphere, and the WASPish habitus of Graham and his acolytes accounted for the general malaise associated with the predicant’s reception in a (French) culture marked by “a very slow and painful acceptance of religious pluralism” (Fath 2004, 103, 106). TRANSATLANTIC DIVIDE : EVANGELICALS AT THE BALLOT BOX

As mentioned earlier, French evangelicals vigorously objected to the allegation that they were uniformly aligned with the faith-based foreign policy agenda of their American counterparts. Comparative data of the political views of evangelicals in both countries in the early 2000s helps to assess the French difference in these matters. It is undeniable that the white Christian vote was determinant in electing George W. Bush president of the United States in 2000 and 2004. Whether he genuinely walked the walk or skillfully talked the talk on the subject of America as a Christian nation, it is clear that the considerable attention given by the media to his religious views con-

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vinced a vast majority of white evangelical Protestants that he shared their most deeply held beliefs and values. As a result of a reciprocal, reinforcing pattern in the psychological dynamics of conviction, they saw themselves in him even as they saw him as one of them rather than as a member of the Establishment elites, be they moderate Republicans, mainline Protestants, or “secular humanists” (i.e., liberal or progressive Democrats). During Bush’s two mandates, conservative Christians overwhelmingly supported the idea that religion must help to shape national politics, while almost all Democratic voters opposed the notion. A 2004 Pew survey found that while 38 per cent of the public identified as Republican, the number went up to 56 per cent for evangelicals; sixty-eight per cent of respondents said it was important for a president to have strong religious beliefs, a position held by 87 per cent of evangelicals (Rozell 2006, 21). A Zogby International poll in that same year, when the president faced John Kerry as his democratic challenger, found that “seventy-five percent of Bush’s supporters said that a president should emphasize his religious values, while 96 per cent of Kerry’s supporters said that religion is a private matter that does not belong in public discourse” (22). Polling data and voting statistics collected between 2000 and 2004 confirm the key role played by the religious right in sending George W. Bush to the White House twice, even if, as Rozell put it, “many of the postelection analyses in 2004 overreached in evaluating the role played by religious conservatives in Bush’s victory and the extent to which he ‘owed’ the movement in his second term” (2). Mainline Protestants divided their votes equally between Bush and Kerry, who received 47 per cent of the Catholic vote, while white evangelicals overwhelmingly supported the incumbent president. In the South Carolina primary, Bush had routed his republican opponent, John McCain, among religious right voters 68 per cent to 24 per cent; in the general election, white born-again Protestants (who numbered 23 per cent of the electorate) favoured Bush over Kerry by 78 to 21 per cent (22). Evangelical voters did not march in lockstep, however, especially when segmented by race and class: 83 per cent of Black Protestants, including evangelicals (mostly theologically conservative Baptists) supported the Democratic candidate in 2004, while “low-income evangelicals were nearly twice as likely to vote for Kerry as their highincome counterparts. Nearly half of all evangelicals reported family

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incomes below $50,000 [the national median was $44,400 at the time], and nearly one-third of them voted for Kerry – nearly doubling those Kerry voters among high-income evangelicals (17.5 percent).”16 The evangelical community was far from monolithic in terms of theological views, religious practice, or movement identification, all internal fissures “that have largely escaped scholars and pundits alike.” On the basis of their survey, the authors proposed to classify evangelicals as traditionalists, centrists, and modernists. “Traditionalists score high on theological orthodoxy, exhibit high levels of religious practice, and identify with traditionalist religious movements (e.g., the evangelical and fundamentalist movements). Modernists are more heterodox in beliefs, somewhat less active in religious practices, and identify more with liberal religious movements (e.g., theological liberalism and ecumenism). Centrists fall between the two camps” (Rozell, 2006, 46). Less than half of the modernists, who represented 8 per cent of the sample, voted for Bush. In the absence of a comprehensive study of the politics of French evangelicals in the early 2000s, it is difficult to corroborate with substantial quantitative data the various statements regarding their views of 9/11 and after. Recent statistics are more readily available, in large part because of the growing influence and visibility of the movement. According to a recent study published by the Conseil National des Evangéliques de France, more than 1,750 local churches were created between 1970 and 2017, an average of a new one every ten days.17 The number of faithful has doubled since 2004 from about 350,000 to an estimated 650,000 in 2017, including 150,000 in the Antilles, with the highest concentration of these communities in urban areas (the greater Paris area, Alsace, and the southeast). In his study of evangelical networks in France, R. Alex Neff has argued that during the Third Republic (1871–1914) a majority of French evangelicals, like many reformed Protestants, voted for the left and aligned themselves with a republican tradition that championed religious pluralism and the rights of minorities (Jews and Protestants) (Neff 2016). In the context of Cold-War anti-communism and the counterculture of the sixties, some evangelicals moved to the right, as evidenced by a 2010 poll showing that while 46 per cent of them still supported left-wing parties, one third voted for moderate conservatives, with only 5 per cent openly siding with the far right National Front. The gap between American mainline and born-again Protestants does not seem to hold in France, since the survey analysis concluded that

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“the usual opposition between a left-wing reformed protestant and a right-wing evangelical [voter] does not correspond to reality.”18 Neff also mentioned the limited influence of the American religious right in France, confirming Fath’s view that “French evangelical protestants do not make a priority of politics. Their main agenda is not political, and never was” (Fath 2015, 75). At least three factors may have encouraged them to keep their distance from American-style Christian Right politics: the historical alliance of Protestants with liberal republicans against Catholic conservatives; their majoritarian association with the Left and related disapproval of American foreign policy in the Middle East; and concerns with a potential hardening of secularism associated with the growing visibility of Islam in French society. According to a CSA-La Croix-Réforme poll conducted in 2006, 71 per cent of evangelicals agreed that “in France, only laïcité enables people with different convictions to live together,” although many felt that it could also serve as a pretext to exclude Christians from public life (32). The media campaign in France occasioned by the global engagement of American evangelical “internationalists” behind the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq led evangelicals in France to downplay their association with American churches for fear of unsollicited attention and reprisals (den Dulk 2007). A pastor quoted in Neff’s study wondered “how you can go to a foreign country with unjust reasons, machine gun in hand. Already, when a Frenchman sees that, he says: here come the evangelicals!” A missionary in Strasbourg struck a similar chord: “Because of my American origins, I even hesitate to identify myself as an evangelical in France, because of the association people make with the conservative political movement in the United States. I find that for many French people, the word evangelical means a certain kind of Republican.”19

Introduction

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6 A French 9/11? Paris 2015: Identification, Hegemony, and Dissent

France was the site of two major instances of mass killings within the first ten months of 2015. On 7 January, a jihadist commando associated with al-Qaeda in Yemen killed seventeen people in Paris and wounded twenty-two, including journalists, cartoonists, and employees of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, police officers, and shoppers at a kosher market. On 13 November, the city was again rocked by a series of coordinated operations aimed at a soccer stadium, several cafés and restaurants, and the Bataclan theatre, a popular concert hall. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), often referred to in the French media by its Arabic acronym Daech, claimed responsibility for the radicalized violence that killed 130 people, including ninety in the music theatre, and injured another 413, one hundred of them seriously. The two events inevitably conjured up comparisons with what had happened in the United States and were often labelled “the French 9/11.” Although fortunately not as lethal, they were the deadliest in France since the end of World War II (including political violence during the Algerian war of independence) and in Europe were second only to the Madrid train bombings of 2004 that killed 190 people and injured 2,000. The Paris massacres were related to a decade-long history of French military interventions against Islamist groups in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and the Sahel region in Africa and were claimed by jihadist organizations as retaliation for blasphemous caricatures of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad published in Charlie Hebdo and air strikes against the Caliphate in Syria. Like 9/11,

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they had struck at the heart of a major Western capital, a worldhistorical city that combined the economic, political, and cultural roles of New York City and Washington, DC. Previous occurrences in Madrid and London (2004, 2005) had already invited comparisons with September 11 not only from journalists but from many people sharing their reactions on social media or in letters to the press. Two days after the Madrid bombings, Le Figaro published some reflections on the Spanish “9/11” (in quotation marks, which might be taken as pointing out the imperfection of the analogy), while others broadened the impact to the whole of Europe. Le Monde announced that “Now Europe will have its 11 March,” and Der Tagesspiegel claimed that “In Madrid, Europe has experienced its 9/11” (Truc 2018, 41). Le Monde was the first to mention le 11-septembre français after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo in the headline of its 9 January issue, while best-selling philosopher Michel Onfray immediately wrote about “our September 11.” The phrase continued to be used in the following months as counter-insurgency specialists repeatedly warned about the likelihood of a deadlier strike and governmental agencies grew increasingly alarmed. On 2 October, six weeks before the November massacres, Slate magazine published a list of “French-style versions of September 11” (des 11-septembre à la française) during the previous decade, from the explosion of a chemical factory in Toulouse on 21 September 2001 that triggered suspicions of terrorism among conspiracy theorists to the killings of soldiers and several teachers and students at a Jewish day school by Mohamed Merah in the same city in March 2012. The Slate article mentioned that a former anti-terrorist judge had predicted in Paris-Match on 30 September 2015 that unprecedented levels of violence would occur in the near future: “Terrorism is all about oneupmanship; the point is to push further, to hit harder. And then, there is ‘the Goncourt prize of terrorism’ [a reference to France’s most prestigious literary award], and by this I mean the attacks of September 11, 2001 against the towers of the World Trade Center. I can’t imagine for a moment that a man like Abu Bakr ad-Baghdadi [the leader of ISIS at the time] and his army would be content for very long with small-size external operations. They are thinking of something much bigger, targeting France first and foremost.”1 The November tragedy drew more parallels to 9/11 in view of the greater number of victims and because the French authorities’ immediate reactions were reminiscent of those of the American adminis-

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tration: retaliatory military operations, state of emergency, increasing surveillance, institutional and legislative management of political violence, and limits put on civil liberties. The London-based progressive media platform openDemocracy urged France not to follow “the American counterterrorist playbook” and “make Paris the French 9/11” by framing it as an act of war and not to opt for “the same discredited, costly, and counterproductive model of pursuing homeland security.” In support of its call for a different response to “the cold-blooded, meticulously planned acts of mass murder of random civilians,” the article listed several long-lasting social, political, and economic disruptions occasioned by the misguided global war on terror.2 The track record entailed the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the displacement of millions of people, many of whom had sought refuge and asylum in Europe and the Middle East, tens of thousands of injured and traumatized veterans, billions of dollars spent on security, the creation of military tribunals and indefinite detention without trial for enemy combatants in secret prisons, the use and legitimation of torture as an interrogation technique, the extradition of suspects in violation of human rights and international laws of war, and the radicalization of countless self-recruited and selfradicalized Muslim youth eager to fight and die for the Islamist cause at home and abroad. Not to mention the strengthening of the executive branch of government, an uptick in authoritarian anti-immigrant populism, the undermining of privacy rights, an increase in personal data collection by state agencies and private companies, all conditions conducive to hate crimes, discrimination, prejudice, and the fashioning of anxious populations prone to irrational bursts of violence. The article in Slate concluded that internal terrorism could not be entirely controlled and eliminated as a risk, that it had become a constitutive feature of contemporary societies like gun violence, nonideological mass shootings, pandemics, natural disasters, transportation accidents, and infrastructure failures because it was impossible to “track every single move of thousands of potential suspects.” The only way to minimize the threat in its present form was by complex social and economic reforms that addressed the root causes of individual acts of violence stemming “from the interplay of specific social and psychological conditions and ideological manipulations.” Liberal columnists were not the only ones to draw parallels between 2015 and 2001. Derk Jan Eppik, a senior fellow at the conservative London Centre for Policy Research, simply titled his piece

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on the aftermath of the shootings at Charlie Hebdo: “The French 9/11.” He rejected the left’s social-engineering view of the management of mass violence and faulted political, cultural, and media elites for having far too long “hoped that Islamic terrorism could be appeased by politically correct, ‘non-provocative’ attitudes and social programs.” The jihadist commandos had struck against freedom of expression, emboldened by decades of political leaders filtering their words and mainstream media pursuing a policy of self-restraint when reporting on Islamism for fear of insulting Muslims. Both liberals and conservatives agreed that the problem was “homegrown terrorism” but diverged widely on its causes and the ways to address them. The issue for Eppik was not housing discrimination and the lack of economic opportunities in major western European cities. The perpetrators were returning jihadists from Syria, trained for urban guerrilla in the Caliphate’s military camps, and they were “not longing for the European welfare state, they prepare[d] for battle. In particular, the European left will have great difficulty in understanding this phenomenon because it believes all evils can be cured with the help of social policies.” The author linked the rise of anti-establishment parties to popular resentment of the “Islamization of Europe” and blamed politicians for ignoring these signals and dismissing protesters as far-right individuals. The French 9/11, he concluded, “should open their eyes.”3 The irony of France being the target of major attacks twelve years after its vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq was not lost on anyone, and November 2015 prompted a transatlantic re-evaluation of more than a decade of a global struggle against Islamist radicalism. In some ways, the tables were turned: while the US media in their vast majority had supported an armed response to 9/11 and the national backlash against the French, many American commentators now urged Paris not to repeat the mistakes of the Bush administration by giving in to the temptation of reactive, punitive actions at home as well as abroad. For The Atlantic, “the U.S. should treat France as France treated the U.S. 14 years ago – by helping the other wage prudent fights and warning its leaders against the rash decisions that trauma can lead to.” The magazine went on to quote approvingly from Jacques Chirac’s advice to Washington in 2003 to explore a “more normal, less dramatic way than war” and listed the dire consequences of the “ill-chosen” intervention in Iraq, which convinced a growing number of Americans that the costs of that decision had far out-

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weighed its benefits.“As it turned out, the Iraq War killed many more Americans than 9/11, cost trillions of dollars, and destabilized the Middle East in ways that directly empowered the regime in Iran and gave rise to the terror group Isis.” Being wronged, the Atlantic article concluded, “does not itself make one an infallible judge of the right course,” suggesting that France would be well advised to heed Chirac’s words of wisdom and learn from history rather than repeat it. The French authorities apparently did not read the magazine and failed to heed those lessons from the past, as they promptly declared a threemonth state of emergency and proceeded to launch their biggest airstrikes to date on the Caliphate’s positions in Syria.4 The openDemocracy piece quoted earlier ended its critique of the lawand-order, militarized response to the 13 November killings by stressing how unsuccessful the country had been in managing ethnic and religious relations in the past, “failing to deliver fully on its integration promise” of a “very large Muslim population,” a common complaint from Anglo-American observers of racial politics in France. Of equal concern were the country’s republican institutions, “a political system with much more centralized power [than the US], a strong executive and strong state emphasizing secularism,” another view of the French Revolution’s Jacobin legacy shared by both liberals and conservatives in the United States and Britain since the days of Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. As a result, a “misguided response” would bring about serious social and political damage and “the exacerbation of the roots of the problem,” which rested in the inability of French society to adequately come to terms with religious pluralism. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on 30 December 2015 significantly entitled “After the French 9/11, Le Patriot Act,” took a similar tack, predicting that the French government was following the lead of the Bush administration, while democratic institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law would be far less protected in France as they had been in America, quoting as an example Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s intention to rewrite the constitution to fight terrorism more efficiently. “Those Americans who wish that the United States had acted a bit more Gallic in the mad aftermath of Sept. 11,” the author wrote, “may want to track recent developments across the pond. Washington has bent the Constitution wherever it could since 2001, but our document is far less pliable and far more subject to judicial defense. Yes, we launched the disastrous Iraq war (over noisy French objections), petulantly renamed our Capitol frites and created a vast,

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secret surveillance state while constantly lying about it. Excepting the freedom fries, these are not small things. But imagine a Bush or an Obama administration unchecked by the Bill of Rights or by article 5 – which sets the bar high for altering the Constitution – and you’ll begin to understand the situation in France today.”5 These reactions showed how the gap between Americans still mired in the tragic mess of history and Europeans living in a Kantian posthistorical universe evoked by Robert Kagan in his Power and Paradise: America and Europe in the New World Order (2004) had only widened in the decade following the publication of the book. Just as in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, a large segment of public opinion insisted in seeing the Paris killings as crimes rather than acts of war and their victims as martyrs rather than military casualties and continued to contrast the vengeful and bellicose tone of many Americans after 9/11 with the peaceful, compassionate, and cosmopolitan outlook evidenced in the large ceremonial gatherings following the January massacre. JE SUIS CHARLIE : UNIVERSALIZING SOLIDARIT Y

On Sunday, 11 January 2015, three to four million people took part in “republican marches” all across France, a response so massive that it became as significant an event as the tragic events that motivated it, even though it did not equate the reaction to the Madrid bombings when eight million Spaniards took to the streets on 12 March 2004. Why did so many gather in Paris and major French cities? Were they protesting against terrorism or defending democracy? Supporting the right to free speech and blasphemy? Did they represent a silent majority that had finally found a collective voice in a country Julia Kristeva, among others, once described as suffering from a profound “national depression”?6 Was the reaction a display of unity that would mark a turning point in race relations? Many commentators noted the strikingly amorphous content of the message(s) conveyed by the subdued, mournful presence of millions who quietly shared their grief, seemingly without any specific agenda, particular claims, visible resentment, or raised fists, laying no blame at the foot of the government, the authorities, the police, or even the perpetrators of the bloodshed. The cover page of the first issue of Charlie Hebdo after the massacre, a caricature of a tearful Muhammad with the caption Tout est pardonné

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(All is forgiven), eerily confirmed the emotional tenor of the gatherings that looked more like a collective wake than a protest march or an angry call for retaliation, unlike the demonstrations against “Charlie” that were soon to follow in various parts of the Muslim world. One certainty emerged: a series of deadly actions aimed at silencing speech ended up freeing all kinds of speech, including hate speech, in an unprecedented manner. As already mentioned, the date of the demonstrations prompted yet another reading of the event: 11 January became the French September 11, even though the number of victims was incomparably lower. The reaction to the shootings became a blank slate, a kind of political Rorschach test on which commentators projected rival readings, trying to give voice to people who did not say much, with the exception of those posters and banners silently claiming I Am Charlie. The slogan involved a universalization of the victims’ fate that gave the bloodshed a global resonance largely absent from the reactions to 9/11 in the United States, mostly couched in local (the city of New York) or national patriotic rhetoric. The posters carried by the marchers did not ask, as many Americans had anxiously done fourteen years earlier, “Why do they hate us so much?”, nor did they describe the killings as a world-historical event, the result of a planetary clash of civilizations. One way of answering that other question, “what did these people want?” is to address the multiple meanings of the Je suis Charlie statement. Many observers gave in to the temptation to read a political agenda, a moral statement, a set of ideological claims behind the deceptively simple expression of a subject’s identification with the targets of a barbaric act. In fact, “Charlie” quickly became a placeholder, an empty signifier to be filled by a variety of competing and at times contradictory contents. As the meme gained popularity and the polemics surrounding its use took on global proportions, it was replaced by the names of the victims and eventually by those of the attackers themselves. Inspired by Martin Hanson’s popular children’s books Where Is Waldo?, the original logo was designed by cultural journalist Joachim Roncin, who subsequently tried to oppose its commodification on tshirts and coffee mugs to prevent the trivialization of his original intent. I Am Charlie belongs to a long line of rhetorical strategies of identification with the subjects of political power. During the Cold War, John F. Kennedy famously declared in West Berlin that he was a Berliner too, in solidarity with those whom the communist regime forbade to leave the city as they pleased. In May 1968, French students

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showed support for one of their leaders, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, threatened with expulsion by the French government because he was also a German national, by chanting “We are all German Jews,” and two days after 9/11, French journalist Jean-Marie Colombani claimed that “We are all Americans.” The massacre of eight parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, historical Black church by a white supremacist on 17 June 2015 prompted the creation of “#I am AME,” after the name of the targeted congregation (American Methodist Evangelical). The marchers for Charlie applied the same strategy of self-identification and appropriation in relation to the victims’ profession, nationality, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. Many of them held posters with statements in the first person apparently referring to themselves and listing a multiplicity of identities: “I am a cop, I am a journalist, I am an atheist, I am Jewish, I am Muslim, I am Christian, I am French, I am human, etc.” If simply including a single, individual self-description, this kind of subject position would be both illogical (by claiming to be concurrently A and non-A) and impossible (it would be quite unusual to identify as both a Muslim and an atheist), even in accord with the principle of intersectionality implying the coexistence of multiple identities in one person. In the statement I Am Charlie the predicate is not a discrete individual but a chain of equivalencies depicting (or wishing for) society as a diverse and yet inclusive whole, a perfect illustration of the focus on tolerant pluralism found in the mass rallies.“I” becomes the declarative position of a collective subject whose various components can live together side by side, juxtaposed serially as a list without any hint of incompatibility. To the extent that one of the objectives of the movement was to substitute love for hatred, the slogan pointed to the realm of social desire, and the principle of noncontradiction needed not apply, since the unconscious, according to psychoanalytic theory, ignores logical inconsistencies. Each individual could vicariously assume, without a sense of personal contradiction, a constellation of subjectivities that she could not display in real life. This imaginary identification with a set of multiple social selves allowed every Charlie to become as diverse as the larger whole she belonged to and as inclusive as she wished the imagined community to be. Since each “I” was associated with a generic profession, ethnicity, or creed, anonymity allowed interchangeability, each identity became fluid, free-floating, every subject of enunciation could serve as a substitute for all the others. The open-ended subject position associated with Charlie actualized the multicultural ideal or

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threat (depending on which side you were on) of a vivre ensemble where differences freely coexist, as in the well-known bumper-sticker whose letters are made up of symbols of various belief systems. Inversely, however, the plurality of social, racial, religious, professional, and sexual identities displayed by the marchers reversed back to the massive show of uniformity provided by hundreds of thousands of people all carrying signs with the same message. The oscillation between Charlie and its diverse incarnations (cop, journalist, Christian, Muslim, atheist, etc.) underscored the tension between the individual and the collective in a culture where the right to be different can collide with the duty to treat everyone equally, as when conservative Christian business owners in America, for example, claim that they are entitled not to serve gay customers on the basis of their constitutionally protected religious freedom. Liberal democracy and republicanism share the same principle of unity in diversity (e pluribus unum) but propose to achieve their goal through diverging means. In the liberal-democratic version, civil society (parties, unions, media outlets, pressure groups, lobbies, NGOs, etc.) drives the political process through (post-)Enlightenment values of tolerance, compromise, and rational (or at least reasonable) exchange. In the case of the one and indivisible republic, the state is the main guarantor of social integration through its institutions, from public schools to the justice system. The plurality of identities in which each participant in the Charlie movement inserted her own could potentially encompass all the past and future targets of similar acts of mass violence (hence the association of each individual, à la limite, with the entire human race). As a result, the fusion of each separate self in a web of aggregate and interchangeable subjective positions could provide post-traumatic healing even to those who were not the immediate victims of violence. The defiance proclaimed on posters and banners (“France is standing,” “Not afraid,” “You will never win,” etc.) echoed the usual statement from government officials following mass killings that “we will never compromise with terrorism” (which many governments actually do by paying ransom for hostages, for example). In Shell Shocked, his study of the social response to terrorism, Gérôme Truc has provided a useful description of the tensions between the “we” and the “I” in contemporary social formations imbued by what he called the paradox of “common singularity.”7 Many of the messages to the victims reviewed by Truc, whether postal letters or emails, were written in a highly personal style that never-

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theless expressed a form of Durkheimian organic solidarity, “based less on the resemblances than on the differences between individuals – on the recognition of the fact that they are all singular individuals, who occupy their own place within society” (Truc 2018, 134). Rather than accounting for the litany of social or cultural identities on the previously mentioned posters (“I am a journalist, a police officer, a Muslim, a French woman, etc.”), organic solidarity refers to distinct personal identities such as the names of Charlie Hebdo’s victims listed in Libération the day after the murders. The kind of connection does not involve for Truc “the invocation of a common belonging” in the usual sense (ethnic or religious community, profession, class, nation, etc.) but “rather a common singularity shared by the victims of the attack and the authors of the messages: all are unique human persons, with a first name, a family name, and an origin” (134). In other words, reactions to mass violence “express a solidarity based on a direct connection between singular human lives: the lives of the victims and the life of the person who is sorry for their fate” (178), regardless of the various reasons to feel compassion and empathy. The paradox lies in “a certain sensitivity to the suffering of others that is characteristic of ‘singularist’ societies, where even our connections with other people proceed from an exacerbated sense of ‘I’” (202). Reflecting on the changes in the “we/I balance” in contemporary societies, Norbert Elias argued that “social life increasingly tends to take place against a global horizon, where humanity appears as the ultimate relevant social unit” (cited in Truc 2018, 144), which would account for the cosmopolitan humanism present on many of the posters of 11 January. This specific form of universalized empathy can be extended to the entire human race, as illustrated, for example, in the growing awareness of the planetary consequences of climate change regardless of national affiliation. As Truc put it, “the momentum of collective solidarity that can be observed in our societies in response to an attack always proceeds from an aggregation of different meanings of ‘we,’ and not just from the activation of a straightforward feeling of common belonging. And if this is correct, it is because we are no longer confined to allegiance to a single group; the process of social differentiation characteristic of modern societies implies, on the contrary, that we play a part in a multitude of social circles, at the intersection of which each one of us asserts himself or herself as a single individual ...

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That is also why, at the same time as involving a multiplicity of meanings of ‘we,’ our reactions to attacks demonstrate a heightened sense of ‘I’ ... The slogan ‘I am Charlie’ has become the visible symbol of this phenomenon, symptomatic of the importance assumed in our societies by organic solidarity” (225). The author was quite aware of the internal contradictions implied in the tension between “I” and “we” and of the diverse forms taken by the communities of grief and mourning, the various publics of terrorism. Close vs distant relations, personal vs impersonal or anonymous messages and narratives, simple condolences to the victims’ families vs broad politically and ethically inflected wishes for a better world make up “a continuum of scales of identity which resemble concentric circles nested within one another, ranging from the most local to the most global (or vice versa), that is, to the common humanity Hannah Arendt called ‘love of the world’” (144). Truc rightly reminded the reader that the “I” in “I am Charlie” has given rise to conflicting interpretations: “Some saw it as culmination of individualism exacerbated by social media, narcissism of the ‘Me Generation,’ last avatar of postmodern egocentrism; others viewed it as a major sociopolitical invention, the sign of a historic turning point” (178). He pondered whether the cosmopolitics inherent in much of the Charlie movement and its later incarnations was limited by the kind of values it promoted: freedom, tolerance, and inclusivity. The sacralization of human life, a professed love of mankind linked by some to the Christian notion of agapè (as opposed to retributive justice) is another of these values associated with the Western Enlightenment, at the risk of promoting Eurocentric views ironically complicit with the clash of civilizations thesis. The extension of the “we” to the entire planet and human race undermines the opposition between “us” and “them” among the victims but leaves untouched the challenge posed by the othering of the jihadists themselves (perceived as sharing none of these values) and their place in the human community. Should we think of them as “extraterrestrials” in reference to Ulrich Beck’s remark that 9/11 was an attack from our own “internal Mars” (Beck 2006, 35)? We are left to wonder, Truc remarked, whether the cosmopolitanism of the Europeans, as opposed to the nationalism of many Americans after 9/11, “might not turn out to be nothing but the umpteenth avatar of their propensity to arrogate the universal to themselves and to set them-

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selves up as speaking on behalf of all humankind” (Truc 2018, 157). This is evidenced by the ubiquitous mention of Spanish and French “9/11s” but not Indonesian or Moroccan ones, although terrorism struck Bali (2002) and Casablanca (2003) as much as it did Paris or Madrid. The fact that acts of terror perpetrated outside of the United States or Europe rarely appear to us as new 9/11s, however deadly they might have been, illustrates a “Western-centered view which contradicts the desire to promote a cosmopolitan point of view. And this contradiction has become constitutive of our relation to Islamist attacks” (56). VICTIMIZING THE BODY POLITIC

The universalization of solidarity in the Charlie movement was largely absent from the American reaction to 9/11. The anti-war movement was made up of radical organizations such as ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and NION (Not in Our Name) that remained divisive and controversial even within the Left and failed to mobilize the massive popular reaction witnessed in Madrid or Paris. The counter-terrorism decisions taken by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, however, had much in common, combining appeals to national unity with a set of repressive legislative and policing measures. The respective presidential addresses of 11 September 2001 and 27 November 2015, for example, exhibit a number of comparable rhetorical structures. In the opening words of both speeches, George W. Bush described “thousands of lives suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror” and François Hollande a cowardly “act of war organized from afar and executed in cold blood ... by a horde of assassins [who] killed 130 of our citizens and wounded hundreds of others, in the name of an insane cause and a betrayed God.” In both cases, the attackers’ target was said to be freedom as the most valuable emblem of the national belonging, “our way of life, our very freedom” for Bush, “they were killed because they were France, they were massacred because they were freedom” for Hollande. Initial expressions of compassionate solidarity with the victims and their families gave way to vigorous assertions about the resilience of an undaunted, undivided if wounded country. “These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong ... These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve” (Bush); “What do the terrorists want? To

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divide us, to oppose us, to set us against one another. I assure you that they will fail ... We will not give in to fear or hatred” (Hollande). Next, both speeches conveyed the solemn assurance than the crimes would not go unpunished and promised immediate measures to insure the people’s security. The American president proclaimed that “our military is powerful, and it is prepared ... I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” while his French counterpart declared that “together, we will vanquish the enemy ... In this fight, we can count on our military, engaged in difficult operations in Syria, Iraq, and the Sahel. We can rely on our police and gendarmes who, in connection with the justice system, have behaved admirably to eliminate the terrorists.” Lastly, both leaders expressed their gratitude to elected officials and foreign allies for their unwavering support in a time of great crisis: “I appreciate so very much the members of Congress who have joined me in firmly condemning these attacks. And on behalf of the American people, I thank the many world leaders who have called to offer their condolences and assistance”; “We can rely on the Parliament to adopt all the measures needed for the defense of the country’s interests, in a spirit of national harmony and the respect of fundamental liberties ... I cannot forget those images from the entire planet celebrating in the same movement the sacrifice of those who have died in Paris, as if the entire world had gone into mourning” (Bush 2001, 57–8; Hollande 2017). The symbolic transfer of individual victims to the wounded body of the entire nation has become a ritualized feature of the public authorities’ response to mass violence, whether politically motivated or not. François Hollande’s televised address of 10 January 2015, during which he actually announced “the great rally” scheduled for the following day, was no exception. The events were “a tragedy for the nation,” which had metaphorically become the prime target of the bloodshed. In a rhetorical move reminiscent of the process of identification displayed by the marchers themselves, the bodies of the dead were subsumed within the larger whole of the nation identified as we, the people (the slogan Nous sommes tous Charlie [We are all Charlie] possibly included the president himself, as expected in an egalitarian democracy): “We are a free people who give up to no pressure, who are not afraid, because we carry an ideal which is bigger than us.” The holder of the highest political office in the land later called for the national unity befitting a crisis of this magnitude, exhorting all of his

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countrymen and women, regardless of their political or religious persuasion, “to rise up this Sunday to carry the values of democracy, freedom, and pluralism which we all hold dear, and that Europe in a way represents.”8 Undoubtedly encouraged by the unprecedented popular mobilization of the previous Sunday, the prime minister expanded on the president’s address in his speech to the National Assembly on Tuesday, 13 January. Manuel Valls stressed the need for collective solidarity among the citizenry (the local) and for the celebration of France’s image in the world (the global), received a standing ovation from the elected representatives, and prompted them to sing the national anthem.9 His speech echoed several of the themes put forward during the rallies of 11 January, especially when he mentioned the victims’ religious and professional backgrounds as an expression of the country’s diversity (Hollande would do the same in November). The deceased showed, the prime minister said, “the various faces of France, and many of its symbols: the freedom of expression, the vitality of our democracy, republican order, our institutions, tolerance, laïcité.” The terrorists,” he went on, “have killed – murdered – journalists, police officers, Jewish French people, and employees. The terrorists killed celebrities and anonymous people, people of different origins, opinions and creeds. Yes, France is the one that was struck in her heart.” Born in Barcelona of a Catalan father and a Swiss mother, Valls referred to some of the victims as “des Français juifs” (Jewish French people) rather than the customary “Juifs de France” (French Jews), giving precedence to national affiliation over other markers of identity, possibly to reaffirm his own national-republican, i.e., anti-communitarian, credentials.10 In the same way that François Hollande had included France’s democratic ideal within the European tradition a few days earlier, the prime minister expanded the limits of la République to coincide with the entire world, delivering in soaring rhetoric his own version of the country’s exceptional legacy as le pays des droits de l’homme (the country of human rights): “The support and solidarity from the entire world, the press, everywhere, from the citizens who demonstrated in several capitals, from heads of state and governments, were not mistaken: it is indeed the spirit of France, its shining light, its universal message that the attackers tried to destroy. But France remains on her feet. She is still here, she is still present.”11

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POLITICAL HEGEMONY IN QUESTION

In his book on the Charlie movement, Emmanuel Todd rightly pointed out that “four million people is not everyone,” undermining Valls’s appeal to the “spirit of January 11” by substituting a sobering statistical reality for the fantasy of an undivided citizenry. Despite the stylistic and semiotic portability at the core of its instant dissemination, the deceptively simple statement I am Charlie was soon rejected by dissenting acts of reversed identification undermining its message. While Jean-Marie Le Pen ironically renamed himself “Charlie Martel” after the Frankish prince who stopped the advance of the Saracen armies from Islamic Iberia in 732,12 Muslim demonstrators from Senegal to Pakistan brandished signs that read “If you are Charlie, then I am Kouachi” in reference to the brothers who had attacked employees of the satirical magazine. French comedian, actor, and political activist Dieudonné provocatively claimed to have become on the night of 1/11 the fictive “Charlie Coulibaly,” a name associating the victims (collectively represented by the magazine) and one of the perpetrators (Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four hostages in a kosher supermarket before being killed by the police).13 A controversial figure, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala had been convicted for anti-Semitism and tax evasion, many of his shows and other public events being banned by the authorities as public safety risks. He was given a two-month sentence for apology of terrorist acts in March 2015 as a result of his Facebook post. Far from replicating the feeling of solidarity in difference displayed in the initial response to the killings, these controversies uncovered (at least) two political logics at work in the various forms of identification and disidentification with Charlie: 1) a “republican” hegemonic logic of national consensus promoted by the mainstream media and a political alliance ranging from the Socialists to the mainstream Right (but excluding the extremist Front National) and 2) an “agonistic” logic of dissensus that soon undermined the unifying narrative displayed on 11 January. Not only had many people no intention of becoming Charlie, but the universalist politics of solidarity quickly reverted to business as usual, with some public intellectuals taking another opportunity for acrimonious debates. Confronted once again with a country deeply divided along racial, religious, and partisan lines, the French government tried to initiate

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what Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have called a Gramscian “hegemonic” process unable to come to terms with the fundamentally conflictual nature of democratic politics as “agonistic pluralism.” Along this line of thought, Laclau and Mouffe have taken to task some of the most influential theorists of deliberative democracy, including John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. Mouffe has argued that “one of the shortcomings of the deliberative approach is that, by postulating the availability of a public sphere where power would have been eliminated and where a rational consensus could be realized, this model of democratic politics is unable to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism that the pluralism of values entails and its ineradicable character. This is why it is bound to miss the specificity of the political, which it can only envisage as a specific domain of morality ... Since any political order is the expression of a hegemony, of a specific pattern of power relations, political practice cannot be envisaged in simply representing the interests of pre-constituted identities, but in constituting those identities themselves in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain” (Mouffe 2000, 13). Mouffe’s remarks provide a useful framework to analyze the aftermath of 1/11, not only in terms of the constitution of antagonistic identities (“I am Kouachi,” “I am Muhammad,” “I am not a terrorist,” “Neither Charlie nor Sharia,” etc.) but as an illustration of the contentious nature of open societies and the risk involved in misreading political dynamics in a democratic context. The national consensus called for by the government as a response to the violence was shortlived: the animosity among various political groups was already evident the very day of the murders, which took place in the late morning of Wednesday, 7 January. That same afternoon, representatives of leftwing organizations met to prepare for a large rally at the initiative of the Socialist party, and later in the day, Prime Minister Valls called former President Nicolas Sarkozy to invite his (centre-right) party to join the demonstrations. By Thursday morning, Marine Le Pen, president of the Front National, said on television that she was eagerly awaiting an invitation from Valls to take part in the rally as well, arguing that the call for national unity would make little sense if her party, which had received a quarter of the popular vote in the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, was excluded. Meanwhile, the three major opposition parties on the centre and the right (UMP, UPI and Modem) had confirmed their participation, with their representatives attending

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another preparatory meeting. Referring to Le Pen’s party, socialist representative Pascal Lamy declared on the Senate’s public radio that “there [was] no place for a political formation that has been dividing French people for years and stigmatized citizens on the basis of their origin and their religion.” The republican logic was now fully deployed, but the achievement of a broad consensus implied the exclusion of the far Right from the spirit of 1/11. There is no inside without an outside: the attainment of the largest possible political bloc paradoxically required drawing a line between those who belonged and those who didn’t. The dismissal of the FN followed not only an ideological argument (why include the proponents of intolerance and prejudice at a mass rally aimed at denouncing them?) but a structural logic as well, the far Right sharing with Islamism, one of its main enemies, the empty place of the excluded term, the inassimilable element that prevents the hegemonic closure of the social. As previously mentioned, the patriotic response to 9/11 in the United States had been overwhelmingly consensual both among the political elites and the citizenry, which was not to be the case in France fifteen year later. Like the American left in 2001, the French gauche de la gauche was divided as to the proper response to the attacks. At first, its major components unanimously rejected the strategy of the mainstream parties, denouncing the rhetoric of consensus as an exercise in political instrumentalization (récupération). Olivier Besancenot, the leader of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, declared that “to find ourselves behind Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, to be with those who go belly dancing before the Front National is beyond our capacity.” Clémentine Autain, the spokesperson for the radical Front de Gauche, said that “l’union sacrée aims at blurring the lines in the interest of political hijacking,” while one of her colleagues argued that “to speak of national unity would mean that the country is at war, which is not the case.” Communist Party member Roger Martelli, echoing Mouffe’s views on the antagonistic nature of politics, predicted that “the consensus would necessarily founder on [political] questions. A society without dissensus is a dying society.” In the end, the far Left was unable to find an agreement: while the NPA chose not to join the marches, the Front de Gauche did take to the streets but kept its distance from the rest of the participants.14

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THE PROLIFERATION OF DISSENT

The participation of many foreign dignitaries in the Paris rally was generally hailed as a sign of worldwide support for the country. Widely publicized images of presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers walking arm in arm in the midst of a sea of anonymous marchers were depicted as a powerful moment of communion among leaders and those they govern. However, the irony and hypocrisy evidenced by the presence of autocratic rulers who were not exactly champions of religious tolerance and freedom of the press at home did not go unnoticed, and it became clear to many that they had made the trip to Paris first and foremost to assure the French government of their continued backing in its war against jihadism in the Sahel region. The logic of dissensus was fast taking over and spreading to various quarters, accusations of racism were once again directed at Charlie Hebdo, and critics decried a double standard in the way the media covered acts of terror depending on the race and nationality of the victims. While Boko Haram’s brutal rule in Nigeria and Chad was believed to have killed 15,000 people, many of them Muslims, since 2009, bloodshed in the Third World customarily received only a fraction of the attention given to mass violence in Western cities.15 At this point, it seemed impossible to stop the freeing up of all kinds of speech, the proliferation of meanings and counter meanings unleashed by the events. Even the initial inclusion of the various shootings into one single narrative started to unravel, as some, especially in religious and conservative circles, suggested that there were at least two kinds of victims here. Charlie’s cartoonists and journalists who had ridiculed sacred beliefs for years had been murdered for what they had done, while the innocent Jewish shoppers at the kosher market and the policewoman in Montrouge were targeted for who they were. Jurist Marcela Yacub, among many others, voiced her concern with the underreporting of the fate of the Jewish victims of Coulibaly’s rampage: “There has been in the commemorations of the victims of terrorism something very problematic.” Given “the almost inexistent space devoted to the Jewish dead,” she wrote in Libération on 23 January 2015, “one has the feeling that to kill people for having drawn caricatures of the Prophet is more serious than killing Jews.” The publication of the first issue of Charlie Hebdo following the massacre, with its caricature of a crying Prophet Muhammad, drove a wedge in the unanimous reaction of most Western mainstream media

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up to that point. In addition to the press in the Arab world, British and American outlets balked at publishing the cartoon for fear of offending Muslims and other religious readers and viewers. The conversation then naturally turned to the status of blasphemy in French law, another instance of exceptionalism in matters of the separation of church and state in a country whose own road to democracy had involved a violently anti-clerical revolution and republican institutions aimed at wresting the control of civil society from the Catholic Church as the spiritual arm of the monarchy. France is the only nation in Europe where blasphemy is legal; many of its neighbours, from constitutional monarchies to republics with long-standing Christiandemocratic traditions, still have laws condemning blasphemy, although they have long remained unenforced. According to the supporters of the right to caricature religious beliefs, the distinction between free speech and hate speech in French law is based on the difference between ridiculing a symbol, such as a particular religious figure, which is legal, and offending or threatening people on the basis of their religion, which is not. The French state attempted to stem the flow of popular support for the jihadists and manage growing communitarian tensions by arresting individuals for both “Islamophobic acts” and “public apology of an act of terrorism” on the basis of an anti-terrorist law passed in September 2014. In the two weeks following the shootings, more than 150 people were indicted, with fewer actually charged. Some were sentenced to several months in jail, and one individual was given four years for public apology of terrorism, a crime that could lead to a prison term of up to seven years if committed on the Internet.16 The lack of coherence in the indictment procedures and the length of the sentences meted out from one case to the next led the Syndicat de la Magistrature, the most liberal of the French judges’ professional organizations, to blame the government for its “hysterical reactions” at a time when the spectre of a French-style Patriot Act was once again discussed in the media. WHO WAS CHARLIE ?

The fantasized national unanimity associated with the marches was also questioned in the scholarly world, as evidenced by the dispute surrounding the publication of Emmanuel Todd’s Qui est Charlie? (Todd 2015a). Todd set the tone in the first pages of the book, describing 1/11

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as an “access of hysteria” and a “totalitarian flash” aimed at silencing oppositional voices, including his own. “By the end of January,” he wrote, “we were learning that some adults had come to display amazingly repressive behaviour: eight and nine-year old children were submitted to police interrogation ... The obsession with Islam, of course, was everywhere ... [Imams as well as rank-and-file French Muslims] were required, like all of us, to utter the ritual formula ‘I am Charlie,’ now synonymous with ‘I am French’ ... Being French meant not simply having the right, but the duty to blaspheme. Voltaire dixit. I could not help thinking of what I had read about the Inquisition’s examination of Jewish converts in order to make sure that they were indeed eating pork like all genuine Christians should” (Todd 2015b, 13). In the remainder of his essay, Todd painted a picture of a country substantially at odds with the dominant narrative, a view that earned him stinging rebuttals in the media as well as from many of his academic peers. Some took him to task for his faulty methodology and culturalist bias, others for his claim that the marchers were not representative of the entire population but mostly of the elites and the urban middle classes. Todd’s main thesis was that far from sharing the egalitarian world view of the French Revolution, the mass mobilization was the expression of a schizophrenic and hypocritical neorepublicanism, “a strange doctrine that pretends to speak the language of Marianne but in fact defines an exclusionary Republic,” ostracizing both the National Front electorate and racial minorities (224).“France is no longer France” (23), he lamented, because the alliance of bobos,17 civil servants, and well-to-do retirees had sacrificed the egalitarian ideal of the Republic on the altar of their own cultural privileges and economic self-interest. In short, France was no longer France because the Left was no longer the Left. The book joined the growing list of essays that had recently faulted the Socialists for having “turned their backs on the working class,” thereby encouraging the transfer of a large section of the popular vote to the far right.18 Todd also took aim at two major elements of the consensual reading of 1/11, reinjecting class divisions in a supposedly unanimous citizenry who had rejected religious fanaticism in the name of post-Enlightenment toleration (what Todd called “the Voltaire effect”). The author of Candide enjoyed an immediate celebrity as the embodiment of a liberal version of the Republic, although he was anything but a republican, unlike Rousseau and his revolutionary, Jacobin disciples. Voltaire’s Treaty on Tolerance, brandished by many

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during the rallies, became an overnight best-seller, forcing its publisher (Éditions Gallimard) to print immediately an additional 10,000 copies. Todd argued that “the new laïciste hysteria” had led to the “divinization of Charlie Hebdo” (2015b, 15), a symptom of France’s profound metaphysical crisis arising from the collapse of Catholicism in particular and religious belief in general. For Todd, Islam had now become the new scapegoat of “militant atheism” (209) and the latest substitute for the Church, the historical enemy and ideological raison d’être of the secularist camp. Todd’s critics rejected his assertion that Charlie’s supporters were ideologically and sociologically homogeneous, belonging exclusively to the upper and middle classes. Writers Ariel Kyrou and Mounir Fatmi, for example, painted a different picture of the rallies, the “multiple and contradictory reality of this mixture of singular beings ... Some sang la Marseillaise. Others, walking by their side, threatened – in jest – to burn their tricolour flags if they continued to insult by their singing [the national anthem] the fierce antinationalism” of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists and cartoonists.19 The contrast between the desire for a collective response to mass violence and the prosaic return to politics as usual in the weeks leading up to the more devastating November events forced many Charlies to experience the disappointment following passionate moments of fusional epiphany. One of the lessons of the post-Charlie letdown may be that the truth of democratic pluralism resides less in the utopia of a reconciled imagined community than in the inevitability of conflicts that violence alone is powerless to resolve in the long run and needs to be addressed in other ways. What remained was the messy business of politics in the open society as the struggle for empowerment, rights, and equality. THE ISLAMIC STATE HATES RANDOMNESS

From January to the aftermath of the November tragedy, there occurred a significant change in the meaning ascribed to mass violence as well as a growing deficit of its readability. The centre of gravity of the response shifted from large public mobilizations to state institutions and bio-political governmentality, the administrative and legal management of the security of populations. January 2015 still fit within a seemingly manageable interpretive framework. The execution in cold blood of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists, cartoonists, and staff

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members remained “understandable” because there were “reasons,” whether acceptable or not, for targeting the magazine. The limited space where the killings took place gave them an almost private character at variance with the intense visibility they acquired overnight. What happened less than a year later at the Bataclan night club and in surrounding areas was of a different nature. The number of the dead (ten times more than in January), the coordinated nature of the assaults located in various parts of a much larger space, and above all the apparently haphazard selection of the victims gave the events an entirely new dimension. The sophistication of the operation clashed with the relative amateurism of the January events and was inversely proportional to the randomness of the targets, making violence both more lethal and more senseless, opposing what looked like a localized score-settling by mobsters to the widespread deployment of seasoned urban guerrillas. January was about a strategically limited instance of political assassination; November involved the premeditated selection of what counter-insurrection specialists call “soft targets,” airports, train stations, commercial centres, schools, stadiums, movie theatres, concert venues, restaurants, tourist attractions, and open-air festivals. And yet, some commentators noted that the location of the killings may not have been as haphazard as it seemed. The victims might not have been as personally guilty in the eyes of the perpetrators as Charlie Hebdo’s journalists and cartoonists, but perhaps they were collectively, indirectly, and “objectively” so, given their social status, their place of residence or their modes of consumption. There developed in some quarters a kind of interpretative overload, an accumulation of theses and hypotheses aimed at proving that, as an article from the online magazine Slate France claimed at the time, “Daech hates randomness,” as if nothing could be more unbearable than the absence of justification.20 Was the Stade de France, the largest sport venue in Paris, targeted because the French president was attending a soccer game between France and Germany, two countries involved at the time in military operations against the Islamic State? And what about the Bataclan theatre, where an American hard rock band, Eagles of Death Metal, was performing that night? What if the place had been chosen because rock music is for religious fundamentalists a symbol of the moral decadence of the West, because the band had recently toured in Israel, because Jewish organizations had previously used the venue to sponsor gala events? Or could it be because housing and entertainment in the 11th district of Paris (where the Bataclan is

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located) attracted bobos and hipsters, highly educated youth whose life chances were drastically at odds with those who dwelled in the economically devastated neighbourhoods many European jihadists come from?21 Had some of these young people’s massive participation in the Charlie movement eight months earlier singled them out for retaliation? If that were the case, what a tragic irony if those who had been selected to die were precisely those whose progressive political and cultural views were more likely to oppose racism, discrimination, and their government’s military intervention in the Islamic world. The thesis of the intra-generational difference between the privileged youth that patronized the cafés and night spots of the 11th district and their counterparts from the working-class banlieues held sway in the media for a while. But weren’t the soccer fans in the Stade de France, who were also the intended victims of the commandos, among the denizens of immigrant and lower-class suburbs (in France, soccer is a working-class sport)? Was the claim that ISIS hates randomness another instance of the refusal to admit that jihadism is not the product of an entirely rational ideology? If the objective of 13 November was to bury Charlie forever, to make sure that universal solidarity was no match for the determination of its opponents, then it had been a success. The only public demonstrations of some importance were clashes between the police and anti-globalization activists during the Paris conference on climate change from 30 November to 12 December 2015. While in January the mobilization of a large fraction of the population alongside its elected representatives had temporarily sealed an alliance among the government, the police, the political parties, and the demonstrators, the post-Bataclan era witnessed a decrease in the pressure of the street in favour of a dynamics centred essentially on the deployment of state power. As if the second wave of bloodshed had evidenced the failure of peaceful collective action, the only credible response now seemed to reside in the reinforcement of public authority, an increased police presence, the intensive surveillance of potential aggressors, the use of classified and protected information, the invocation of the reason of state, and the restriction of civil liberties. The shift from street power to state power went hand in hand with a transition from the public, the visible, and the collective to the private, the confidential and the secretive, and one of the major consequences of the institutional reaction was to prevent mass demonstrations from happening again. While la mobilisation citoyenne (civic

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mobilization) of 11 January had been conceived, organized, and promoted by the government, spontaneous gatherings were now discouraged, closely monitored, and often forbidden. The right to freely and peacefully assemble, previously celebrated as a vector of fraternity, had become in the course of a few months a threat to law and order and a risk to national security. As already mentioned, some concerns in France and abroad had been expressed over the ability of the government to refrain from the repressive, militarized response that had followed September 11 in the United States. The Los Angeles Times piece entitled “After the French 9/11, Le Patriot Act” had foretold that the French state would jeopardize democratic institutions, civil liberties, and the rule of law in a potentially more damaging way than had been the case in the US, given the lack of comparable constitutional checks on executive power and the volatile state of race and ethnic relations in France. Many of these predictions proved to be accurate. The Hollande administration quickly took a series of measures aimed at reinforcing the anti-terrorist apparatus (known in France as vigipirate) put in place in January, including house arrests of suspects, temporary closure of entertainment venues and meeting spaces, dissolution of associations declared complicit in terrorist activities, and the police’s ability to proceed with administrative searches. The state of emergency was extended for six months following the violence in Nice the following July and then again, a fifth time, from December 2016 to July 2017 in view of the presidential and legislative elections. The exception had become the rule, and France was now effectively in a state of war, at home and abroad. In an interview published in the communist daily L’Humanité a year after the first attack, Gérôme Truc pointed out the differences between the January and November tragedies and argued that the reference to 9/11 was more pertinent in the case of the latter because “the targets were less clear, and the attack looked like what had happened in New York in 2001, Madrid in 2004, or London in 2005: an operation that was coordinated, but also blind ... against ordinary citizens.” By contrast, some of the Charlie Hebdo victims were celebrities, and it had been easier for the public, at least at first, to rally around the idea that freedom of expression, “one of the foundations of the French Republic,” was the main target of the assailants. This gave the massive response associated with the Je suis Charlie movement a symbolic dimension that went beyond the magazine, the city, and the country

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but was not replicated ten months later, in part because the newly declared state of emergency made street demonstrations, even peaceful ones, illegal. In November, Truc remarked, “fear, stunning shock and the warlike context took over,” even though “one can still point to a discrepancy between the discourse of public authorities and the way citizens reacted,” with people writing on Parisian monuments or posting on social networks messages about love, peace, respect for life, and tolerance that were reminiscent of the universalist, idealistic, unified “spirit of January 11.”22 To make matters worse, a truck was used as a weapon to kill eightysix people and wound another 458 on 14 July 2016, seven months after the November massacre. The attack was highly symbolic, since it happened on Bastille Day, the French national holiday, in one of the most attractive tourist areas in the country, giving the event the largest possible impact on the national consciousness and international opinion. It was also greatly predictable, since the highest concentration of French Islamists at the time did not live in the Paris area but in Alpes-Maritimes, the administrative area surrounding the city of Nice. By choosing an open-air festival attracting hundreds of local residents as well as French and international tourists to one of the most celebrated seaside venues in the world, la Promenade des Anglais, the assailant had hit another of those soft targets that make it possible to murder and maim as many individuals as possible in the shortest amount of time. Because of the ban on public demonstrations established eight months earlier, it took three weeks before a closely monitored commemorative “civic gathering” was authorized in Nice, in sharp contrast with the immediate public response to the killings at Charlie Hebdo. The helplessness of the government in preventing a third major strike in eighteen months led to an escalation of the tension among the various sectors of the security apparatus. The national police and the city of Nice imposed on each other the responsibility of the failure to ensure public safety, and several politicians from the opposition objected to governmental policy in the matter, demanding increased repression, the creation of a French detention camp similar to the one in Guantanamo Bay, and the replacement of the state of emergency by a state of siege, an exceptional constitutionally sanctioned option that would transfer the application of criminal justice from the civil authorities to the armed forces and increase military jurisdictions and police powers. Although the state of siege had been enforced during

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some of the major crises in the history of modern France, including revolutions and wars, interestingly enough, given the postcolonial context of Islamist radicalism in France, it was never declared during the war of Algerian independence (1954–62) but was used to repress an insurrection in Kabylia (Northern Algeria) in 1871. The push for the implementation of these drastic measures was indicative of the profound disarray into which the successive occurrence of three major tragedies had thrown the country, with tensions rising between Muslim communities and part of the population, especially on the French Riviera. The crisis had taken its toll, and as time went by, the quiet, peaceful determination that had commanded the admiration of the world gave way to a deep dismay regarding the Islamic State’s ability to sow chaos, civil discord, repression, and authoritarianism in liberal democracies. The three consecutive instances of massive slayings had a considerable impact on the 2016–17 presidential campaign, bringing issues of national security to the forefront and contributing in part to Socialist President François Hollande’s decision not to run for re-election. Following the November events, Hollande had announced a constitutional reform that would deprive all dual citizens of their nationality if charged with terrorist activities. Vigorous initial opposition to such a measure because it would create two categories of citizens led the prime minister to amend the project a few months later, the reform now applying to all French nationals accused of terrorism. The combined rejection of the amended version, which amounted to the creation of stateless individuals, from a number of leading figures in the president’s own party and in the conservative majority in the Senate forced the government to abandon the project in March of 2016. The president later publicly regretted having pushed for the constitutional changes, given the fact that “terrorists want to die” and that as a consequence “depriving them of their nationality has no dissuasive value whatsoever.”23 THE SALAFIST CHICKEN AND THE JIHADIST EGG

Like September 11, the 2015–16 events in France gave rise to a widespread conflict of interpretations. Sociography remained one of the major sources of explanatory paradigms, the proposed causes of radicalized violence stretching from the inegalitarian, impoverished, and discriminatory social conditions affecting the disadvantaged youth issus de

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l’immigration, as the French like to say, to military interventions against warlords in the former French colonies of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, while religion and the conflict of civilizations thesis continued to play a major role in the diagnostics of terror. Social scientists, historians, and public intellectuals were once again invited to address the pressing social demand for expertise about the past and future of the crisis. Islamologists were particularly sought after, and a number of them found themselves increasingly involved in a long-running polemic over the relation between Islam, Salafism, and jihadism. The first salvo was fired by Olivier Roy, whose account of 9/11 fifteen years earlier was discussed in chapter 1. Roy had argued at the time that the reasons for the attacks were to be found neither in Islam or the Middle East, “even if of course these two dimensions overdetermine both al-Qaeda’s discourse and the interpretation of the movement,” nor “in an abstract and metaphysical model of the new evil” (Roy 2002, 13). His position seemed to have changed somewhat on the second point in the intervening years, since he claimed a few days after the November carnage that “jihadism was a generational and nihilistic revolt” of young people, usually males from both Muslim and non-Muslim families, who sought to express their fascination with death under any banner, including radical Islamism at home or abroad. Roy’s position on his first point, however, remained unchanged: this had nothing to do with traditional religion or the geopolitics of the Arab world, since the jihadists of 2015 were late converts to imported forms of Salafism who did not care about the fate of the Palestinians or the Syrian Caliphate. According to Roy, ISIS drew its foreign recruits from a “pool of young radicalized French people who, regardless of what happens in the Middle East, have long become dissidents and are looking for a cause, a label, a grand narrative on which they can inscribe the blood-soaked signature of their personal rebellion.” The annihilation of the Caliphate, he predicted, “will not change anything to their uprising.”24 Roy argued elsewhere that the demographics of radicalism were highly circumscribed and that those who “protest against police brutality in France, and are mostly of Muslim origin, never use the Islamic repertory; their model is ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Their revolt is a demand for equality and justice, of integration rather than separatism, whether it is in the name of Islam or multiculturalism.”25 Those who yearned for acceptance in their own country were obviously not “nihilists” then, as opposed to the homegrown crusaders for Holy War. Not only did the

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latter represent a few thousand individuals among millions of French Muslims, but they belonged to two distinct age-related populations: members of the second generation of (mostly) Maghrebi immigrants and recent converts to Islamic radicalism among the non-Muslim majority. The key to their revolt was what the author described as the lack of transmission of a culturally grounded religion from one generation to the next. In this view, the second generation never adhered to their elders’ religion; they never espoused an exiled tradition weakened by diasporic displacement. The children of immigrants “are Westernized, they speak French better than their parents. They have all shared the youth culture of their generation, drank alcohol, got high, picked up girls in clubs. A good many of them have gone to prison. And then, one fine day, they went through some kind of (re)conversion by choosing Salafism, a form of Islam that rejects the concept of culture, since they want neither the culture of their parents nor a ‘Western’ culture that has become the symbol of their self-hatred.” Roy’s warriors were frenzied individualists, products of (post)modernity who suddenly wished to be “more Muslim than the Muslims,” especially their older relatives whom they vainly strove to convert back to the pure and true version of the ancestral faith. As nihilists, they exhibited “a will to take revenge on their repressed frustration, they enjoy[ed] the absolute power newly found in their will to kill and their fascination for their own death.” As for the freshly converted, “they choose Islam because that’s the only thing available on the market of radical revolt. To join Daech is to be certain to terrorize.” Roy summarized his views in a striking statement destined to enjoy a lasting impact (the debate still goes on): “It’s not about the radicalization of Islam, it’s about the Islamization of radicalism.” Roy was quite aware, of course, of the way his views would inevitably be received in the realm of public discourse, and he preemptively provided his readers with a map of the various theories vying for pre-eminence in the small world of Islamologists. Two dominant readings other than his own, he wrote, currently structured televised debates and filled the op-ed pages of mainstream newspapers: the “culturalist” view and the “tiers-mondiste” explanation. The first one derived from the pre-9/11 clash of civilizations theory and blamed religious fanaticism, claiming that “the young Muslims’ revolt shows the extent to which Islam cannot integrate, at least as long as a theological reform does not erase the call to jihad

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from the Quran.” The second approach was heir to fifties and sixties Third-Worldism and invoked “the postcolonial suffering, the youth’s identification with the Palestinian cause, their rejection of Western interventions in the Middle East and exclusion from a racist and Islamophobic French society.” Both explanations faced the same challenge: if the causes of radicalization were structural, why were they limited to a well-demarcated “fringe” of the Muslim population living in ghettoized neighbourhoods? Two prominent representatives of what Roy had summarily dismissed as “the culturalist theory” published a scathing response three months later in Libération. The title of the piece by Gilles Kepel and Bernard Rougier, “‘Radicalisations’ et ‘Islamophobie’: le roi est nu” (‘Radicalizations’ and ‘Islamophobia’: The Emperor Has No Clothes”), redescribed Roy’s tripartite structure of the debate by replacing the sixties tiers-mondiste approach with the current focus on Islamophobia among the postcolonial and multicultural academic left. For Kepel and Rougier, the twin theses of radicalization and Islamophobia were nothing but ideological tropes disguised as social-scientific theories whose purpose was to minimize or deny the influence of jihadist radicalism in France, thereby “comforting the media/political doxa in its ignorance of social reality and its intellectual arrogance.”26 The authors blamed the attraction of both approaches on the collapse of genuine academic studies of the Arab and Muslim world in French universities and its immediate consequence, the growing inability of students and younger scholars to read propagandist texts in the original Arabic. Olivier Roy was prominently featured in the critique, since his “intellectual posture ... and sloganeering” could only further the denial of the specificity of Islamic terrorism by lumping it together with the ultra-left of the seventies (Italian Red Brigades, German Red Army Faction, etc.) or with the death drive of American teenagers guilty of what Roy himself has called “Columbine-type” mass murders. “If everyone already knows the answer,” Kepel and Rougier asked, “why study the religious roots of jihadism, learn difficult languages, conduct fieldwork in impoverished neighbourhoods where the markers of salafisation have made such progress in the last thirty years?” The fear of being branded an Islamophobe worked hand in hand with the radicalization theory by discouraging all critical analysis of the field of Islam, which had “become, for the new Inquisitors, haram – sin and taboo.” Interestingly, Roy, Kepel, and Rougier’s agreement on the existence of three,

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and only three, possible positions on the issue (neo-radicalism, Salafist hegemonic project, postcolonial critique of anti-Arab racism) revived the triangular structure of the 2002 French debate about the root causes of September 11: the ultimate source of violence was either metaphysical and philosophical (nihilism), cultural/religious (the conflict of civilizations), or political/geostrategic (a response to Western oppression). Unsurprisingly, the American reference found its way into the controversy. Academic theories held responsible for their harmful influence on French research were also put on trial, with a special emphasis on the interpretive damages wrought by the combination of “the American school of rational choices” and its corollary, the exculpatory conception of the terrorist as “an individual who has experienced an initial break (humiliation, racism, rejection ... ) at the root of its ‘radicality’ ... The revolt is thus ready for further ideological formatting” that would equate mass murder with irrationality. Why would anyone decide to kill and to die instead of following his self-interest, which is “to enjoy the happiness of the American Way of Life”? Beyond the vicissitudes of individual biography, this type of research was bound to focus on the ideological offer provided by recruitment cells and individual charismatic leaders who groomed the future terrorists via a process of “sectarian drift” and “religious conversion” to carry out a plan of coordinated destruction. While the ironic mention of the American Way of Life is reminiscent of the 1940s and 1950s, the reference to liberal differencialism made in the US echoed the critique of political correctness imposed by the “thought police” of radical faculty and students on American campuses in the 1990s. There is thus a transnational geography of the debate between Roy and Kepel (as personalized incarnations of rival theories) on the question of homegrown French jihadism. Roy, who used to teach at Princeton, has been associated with la gauche libérale à l’anglo-saxonne (Anglo-Saxon liberal left), while Kepel and Rougier’s view of Islamist propaganda as a cultural challenge to French society and an existential threat to core institutional features such as laïcité landed them squarely in the camp of the neo-republican opponents of postcolonial, multiculturalist, and race studies imports from the other side of the Atlantic. In Kepel’s own words, the entire Islamophobia approach is predicated upon an attempt to “question the ‘neocolonialist white’ culture in its relation to the Other, while refusing to interrogate the ‘ideological uses’ of Islam ... and the way jihadism

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cashes in on a Salafist dynamics born in the Middle East, a vector of values deeply at odds with those of European societies.” In response to critics’ claims that the radicalization of Islam thesis lacked serious empirical grounding, Bernard Rougier recently directed a series of extensive fieldwork studies in various neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris and Toulouse, with the help of graduate students of immigrant background from the area who were familiar with local political issues and modes of sociability and enjoyed an easier access to organizations, key informants, and social actors than non-native outsiders (including Rougier himself, as he readily acknowledged). The results were published in a collective volume whose title, Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme (Islamism’s Conquered Territories), summed up the argument of the book: France was relentlessly subjected to a “hegemonic project” of reversed occupation and colonization conceived abroad, funded by hostile foreign sources, and exercising various forms of symbolic, and sometimes physical, violence on coreligionists in order to quell any dissent.27 The approach rested on the notion of “Islamic ecosystems” made up of irredentist, quasi-autonomous micro-societies comprised of the mosque as a site devoted to both culte and culture (worship as well as political indoctrination), a “halal sandwich shop where men and women were kept separate, a gym where people talked theology, politics or morality,” and in some cases a centre for the teaching of Arabic. The centrality and autonomy of these ecosystems meant that collective life was always already permeated by an overarching religious dimension. The future converts were first socialized via the neighbourhood (le quartier) and the local schools and later led by mimesis to defend Islamic norms of behaviour as solely legitimate. In Rougier’s view, the book was not conceived as a classic sociography of these neighbourhoods (perhaps a way of discrediting the methodology of many of his opponents). As in the symbolic interactionist tradition, the analysis rested rather on the uncovering of multiple “networks of power and meaning” aimed at “regimenting and controlling the religious behavior of all those who live in those places.” The main challenge to any attempt at removing the youth from the discursive hold of their micro-society lay in “the superposition of spaces,” the space of religious predication, of the household, of leisure. As in any total institution structured by autocratic dogma, the pressure to conform rested on the strict ritualization of everyday life, on prescribed ways of eating, dressing, and reading as instances of a

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thoroughgoing “domestication of bodies.” The only solution left to the authorities (mayors, police, school officials, social workers) was to enact “deradicalization programs,” to encourage new forms of sociability and cultural activities among the youth in order to discredit religious rhetoric as old-fashioned and uncool (ringard), and to emancipate individuals from its stranglehold, “which is the meaning of the republican promise.” Having revealed the political underpinnings of his thesis, Rougier went on to denounce all those who were bent on breaking that promise for fear of angering some of their Muslim constituents, of mobilizing anti-racist activists, or of increasing the anti-immigrant ethno-nationalist vote if more scholarly studies of the progression of religious extremism (such as Rougier’s) were funded and publicized. Rougier and his collaborators’ construction of what Roy called “an essentialized Arab-Muslim space,” at war with Western values, stretching from Paris to Baghdad via the Gaza Strip, resonates with recurrent outcries from the anti-immigration right to the secular left against the lawless areas (zones de non-droit) that successive national and local governments have allowed to thrive in inner-city and suburban areas where the police do not dare to get involved. The media’s tendency to dramatize and personalize any issue led to a simplistic binary opposition between cleanly inverted notions such as “the radicalization of Islam” and “the Islamization of radicalism.” The stark contrast between two apparently antinomic approaches was made even more salient by the personal and professional rivalry between Kepel and Roy, including competition for academic grants and private research sponsors, and the way they reviled each other in major media outlets, their names soon becoming household labels for their respective intellectual products on the thriving marketplace of terrorism studies. The portrait of the two scholars turned iconic public figures published in Vanity Fair provides a classic example of the way cultural journalism tends to mix scholarly content and celebrity gossip. This amusing and informative piece draws multiple contrasts between the two “feuding brothers of French orientalism,” as Christophe Boltansky (2019), the author of the piece, put it. Although they went to the same schools and learned from the same mentors and professors, the two men differ widely in their social background, personal habitus, and institutional positions. At the time of the interview, Roy, the grandson of a provincial pastor, lived in a small town some fifty miles from Paris when he was not teaching in Italy; Kepel,

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on the other hand, held professorial posts in two prestigious Parisian institutions, École Normale Supérieure et Institut des Sciences Politiques, and his grandfather was one of the founders of Czechoslovakia in 1918. “Kepel affects a distant politeness,” Boltansky quipped, “an almost British, at times disdainful reserve, an elegant stiffness down to his always impeccable appearance, white shirt and tweed jacket; Roy’s tone is more casual, his demeanor good-natured. The former is used to battering down closed doors, the latter prefers to come in through the window.” The contrast even extended to their radical student days in the sixties. Roy was a Maoist, Kepel briefly joined a Trotskyite organization, a difference the journalist suggested might account for their opposite approach to insurrectional violence.28 The ideological stakes of the debate were quite clear, especially when conveniently framed by public discourse as a strictly binary polemic. If what was happening came from a radicalization of Islam, then the source of the problem lay in religion itself, in Muslim sacred texts, in ancient theological foundations as well as contemporary postmodern developments, in the long history of territorial expansion and confrontation with the West, and even in the anthropological structures of seventh-century tribal communities in the Arabic peninsula. If on the other hand the real issue was the rebellion of a new breed of young radicals whose rhetoric was borrowed from sectarian forms of political Islam for lack of a better offer on the market of ideologies, then one had to look to present cultural dysfunctions in liberal democracies rather than to some medieval archaic theocracy to account for homegrown terrorism. It was like the proverbial conundrum about the chicken and the egg: for Roy, the nihilistic revolt came first; for Kepel, the fundamentalists’ propaganda was creating and feeding it. The first thesis claimed that jihadist radicalism pointed to psychopathological dynamics leading homegrown disturbed misfits to adopt a ready-made suicidal ideology to articulate, organize, and legitimize a pre-existing nihilistic death-drive, while the opposite view focused on a deliberate attempt by foreign activists funded by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates to foment a civil war. THE FRENCH EXCEPTION , ONCE AG AIN

Several specialists of French Islam soon entered the fray, rightly questioning the oversimplification inherent in the stark contrast between the two camps and bemoaning the way Kepel and Roy had encour-

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aged media sensationalism by their own strident, unprofessional ad hominem attacks on one another. Some argued that the two theses were far from being contradictory, echoing former Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve’s statement that “in one case, the problem is Islam; in the other, society. As far as I’m concerned, I always thought their approaches were not antinomic” (cited in Boltansky 2019). Economist Marie-Anne Valfort concurred in yet another article in Le Monde, arguing that the two interpretations were indeed complementary because they pertained to a self-fulfilling “vicious circle” of causation: “Whichever of the two phenomena pre-exists ends up triggering the other, generating a deleterious dynamic where radicalization of Islam and Islamization of radicalism reinforce each other.” In support of her assertion, Valfort mentioned a post 9/11 study by American economists Eric Gould and Esteban Klor confirming the mutually reinforcing effects of discrimination and withdrawal. “Muslims living in states where Islamophobic acts increased the most after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon adopted within ten years more uncompromising religious practices, which was not the case before the attacks. This change of attitude translated into an increase of intercommunity marriages and a reduced participation of women in the job market. Such withdrawal amplifies the marginalization of Muslims.”29 François Burgat, director of the French Institute of the Near East, underscored for his part the political benefits of both Roy’s and Kepel’s dismissal of the geopolitical roots of domestic terrorism. Whether it was the fault of Islamic theology or of the social and psychological pathologies of young marginals, the good news was that “their bombs have nothing to do with ours” and that the West could be fully exonerated from any responsibility in jihad, since the latter had nothing to do with “the counter-performances of la République in terms of integration, its colonial past or the mishaps of its foreign policy in the Middle East.” Burgat confessed that “he had trouble including Kouachi and Coulibaly [the perpetrators of the January massacres] in [Roy’s] category of clueless derelicts [des paumés dépolitisés].” Why spend so much time arguing about political Islam to end up claiming that in the last analysis violence was motivated by the reinterpretation of millenary sacred texts or by some radicals’ existential malaise?”30 Epistemological concerns soon bolstered suspicions of ideological bias, driving the controversy forward. In their struggle for scientific

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legitimacy, orientalists, political scientists, and sociologists accused each other of privileging their own disciplinary objects and methodological protocols, i.e., textual exegesis vs empirical fieldwork. Farhad Khosrokhavar and Jérôme Ferret blamed the champions of le toutreligieux for giving faith systems absolute “precedence over all the other social determinants of a profoundly complex phenomenon.” Kepel’s dismissal of his opponents’ views as based on an inadequate knowledge of Arabic and other Southwest Asian languages and on their unscientific reliance on Wikipedia pages and press articles was turned against his own camp, accused by Khosrokhavar and Ferret of “denying the complexity of the history of social relations or the different internal struggles” in predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods as a result of a lack of empirically generated data. The dire consequence of the debate was the reduction of an entire field of research (Islamic radicalism in France) to a Manichean dichotomy preventing a constructive dialogue among scholars constantly summoned to take sides.31 For Fabien Truong, the “little cockfight” between Roy and Kepel amounted to no more than a set of “cultural conversations” based on the reductive grouping under the single label of radicalization of widely different individual choices: leaving home for a war zone, perpetrating insurrectional violence on French soil, or ordering one’s life around a spiritual conversion. Far from being solely a path to insurrection, religion was for Truong “less an opium than a medium” for the resolution of personal conflicts, answering the need for altruistic commitment, rejecting the consumerist quest for material success, or engaging in some “hyper-individualistic act of self-validation.”32 The sociologist identified three behavioural ideal-types among his subjects: the local terrorists, the travellers to Syria, and the rigouristic Muslims, a division reminiscent of the scholarly description of Salafism as a complex belief system made up of three distinct branches, jihadist, reformist, and quietist. Truong concluded from his study that although “there is no such thing as Islam” (reduced for the sake of ideological strife to an essentialized, one-size-fits-all set of beliefs and practices), religion provides “intimacy” to individuals through ideas that are constantly interpreted and reinterpreted in different places. How does one become a warrior? Truong provided many answers based on his lengthy conversations with local residents of Aulnaysous-bois, the town where Amédy Coulibaly, one of the January 2015 killers, grew up (several of the interviewees knew him). Truong made

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the argument that it takes fewer skills to join the fight for the Islamic State than to carry out an attack at home and that those who succeed have acquired a set of social dispositions and mental resources through a process of criminalized “radical continuity” that has, in this case, “nothing to do with religion.” In the final act, the terrorist “does what he has been doing for so many years, but he pushes it to its ultimate limit, pursuing a morbid process of self-dignifying.” The “manufacture of jihadism” includes a variety of determinants, whether it is a prolonged experience of delinquency, rationalization of social failure, rampant anti-Semitism and the “symbolic signpost of Palestine,” the cult of martyrdom and/or imaginary, fantasmatic projections of “a better elsewhere,” and the redemptive, utopian “desire for Syria,” a powerful drive to run away from it all, to “create a purer, cleaner, new society” where everyone shares your beliefs.33 Olivier Roy himself has acknowledged that there indeed exists religious radicalism (as distinct from political violence) in France as elsewhere in Europe, but “what is specifically French is the response to the problem,” which constitutes the particular instance of a general issue. While there are also Islamist militants in Belgium and Britain and extremist preachers in Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Hamburg, many of France’s neighbours have been “more flexible, more tolerant of religious pluralism and the public expression of belief.” Although the principle of religious freedom inscribed in the French constitution implies the right to practise one’s faith openly beyond the sphere of intimate conviction, hardened conceptions of secularism have increased the pressure to confine religious expression within the private sphere and excluded its most visible manifestations from the public space, a situation French Muslims have been particularly inclined to resist, especially among ultraconservative orthodox communities. The successive battles around the veil, the burqa, and the burqini (integral bathing-suit) since 1989 are a case in point, fuelling the dialectics of stigmatization on the part of society and reactive separatism among those who claim their rights are being violated by the state. Roy, among others, has blamed the French religious exception for an increased “de-socialization and deculturation of the religious” responsible in turn for the attractiveness of the Salafist purist view that true believers should isolate themselves from the rest of society. As Roy rightly pointed out, the French context has not only radicalized some Muslims but many Catholic traditionalists as well, as evidenced by their organized resistance, unequalled in western Europe,

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to LGBTQ rights, medically assisted procreation, or imported gender theory. Trying to eliminate religious practice from the public space ends up comforting its most separatist forms, but fundamentalism ultimately plays into the hands of the secularization process.34 The presence of a self-segregated “Salafist way of life” in what Kepel’s famously called les banlieues de l’islam is undeniable, but the point is to assess the real influence of theological extremism on mass violence. The trilogy of belief, fundamentalism, and jihad involves a set of discrete demographic groups nested in a Russian doll structure, generating questions best answered in the negative: Are most French Muslims affiliated with Salafist mosques? Are most Muslim youth active members of these places of worship? Are most adepts of fundamentalist Islam tempted by insurrectional violence? Do most of those who are supportive of such violence act out at home or abroad? These inverted economies of scale combine a gradual decrease of the numbers of individuals in each category with a dramatic increase in the level of insecurity associated with the last and smallest group on the list, those who actually commit acts of mass violence. The 2015 and 2016 massacres resembled 9/11 in many of their consequences, including an increased demand for experts expected to suggest ways to most efficiently combat their causes (“how can we ‘deradicalize’ the perpetrators?”), a heightening of the political and ideological stakes of the discussion on terror, and a reactivation of the debate about the nature and place of Islam in Western democracies. In the case of France, the controversy pitted critics of rampant Islamophobia in activist groups and academic circles (“mass murders are an excuse to paint the entire Muslim community with the broad brush of terrorism”) against defenders of freedom of speech, secularism, and women’s rights (“how long are we to continue to ignore the hegemonic project of radical imams funded from abroad and the existence of lawless zones in and out of our cities?”).

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Conclusion: Why? Collective Trauma and Its Symbolization

In March 2016, a French newspaper published a photograph taken outside the Maalbeck Metro station in Brussels, the day after three suicide bombings killed thirty-two people and injured another 340.1 On a large poster surrounded by the now customary pictures, drawings, votive candles, and cut flowers left by passersby in homage to the victims, one could read a simple question handwritten in red ink and three languages: Why? Pourquoi? Warum? The message bore no signature, no identified addressees, and no response, perhaps because whoever was asking already knew the answer or because the statement itself was a rhetorical question, a challenge eliciting or requiring no reply. And yet, in the aftermath of any act of collective violence, whether it is deemed political or not, we are assailed by proliferating reasons for what is ritually presented as defying all understanding. As amply documented in this book, the unprecedented nature of 9/11 and the predictable accumulation of tragedies that followed gave rise to countless attempts at making sense of what had happened, including statements about the impossibility of ever doing so from those whose social function is precisely to produce intelligibility, from moral philosophers to civil engineers. Professional thinkers declared the catastrophe and its aftermath unthinkable, visual artists and novelists pronounced it un-representable, and scientists fought over its technological feasibility. The interpretive machine has never stopped since then, from anniversaries and commemorations to official reports and conspiracist denials, driven by the urge to escape from the ground zero of meaning. In many ways, this book has come full circle since the mention in the first chapter of the passage in André Glucksmann’s Dostoïevski à Manhattan in which a survivor from the

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World Trade Center wonders “who did that to us and why?” (Glucksmann 2002, 12). The viral recurrence of terrorism after 9/11 has made us familiar with, and perhaps somewhat immune to, the quest for motive after every mass killing spree in schools, shopping malls, theatres, places of work and worship, as if the uncovering of a reason rather than a cause retroactively changed the nature of the act itself, from senseless to socially, politically, and psychologically manageable. Government agencies, police union representatives, media outlets, experts, bloggers, witnesses, etc., have been ritualistically called to the witness stand in order to provide some meaning to acts of seemingly blind violence whose targets were often randomly selected. The search for an answer is inseparable from the attempt to frame, and thereby keep at bay, the painful traumatic affects born of terror, from anxiety and a feeling of impotence to anger, grief, and despair. One of the first pieces of information sought by both the police and the media as part of the management of intelligibility was whether the attack was of a terroristic nature (nonpolitically motivated mass murders such as school shootings are rarely labelled this way) and whether a known organization claimed responsibility for it, since the source, motive, and opportunity of the rampage, regardless of the number of victims, coloured the perception of the act itself, the way it might be explained, excused, or minimized. Most jurisprudence takes into account the mental state of the perpetrator of a crime, whether he or she can be deemed “irresponsible,” and this determination will bear on the gravity of the sentence itself. The answer to the why of terror may take multiple forms, depending on the identity of the authors and their victims and the specific context of each attack. The murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent massacre in the kosher supermarket were politically motivated, but their understanding was linked to a different set of motivations, from a well-planned retaliation for blasphemous representations of Islam to the indiscriminate execution of Jewish shoppers. The hostage-taking by some of the killers in a factory in rural France, on the other hand, looked more like the dramatic conclusion of a police hunt for criminals that lasted for a couple of days. The immediate investigation of the past of the perpetrators for information on their mental state, social milieu, and religious affiliation is meant to provide the public with a better understanding of the context surrounding their acts, no doubt because an explicable form of violence is less distressing as a pure unmotivated action (acte gratuit),

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if such a thing is indeed possible. The attack in Nice, for example, gave rise to a detailed psychological profile of the killer in the media, including his personal history of petty crime and domestic violence, despite a police investigation that had revealed very little about the man’s possible connection with known jihadist groups on the French Riviera. Far from shedding light on the profound motivations of the actors, contradictory or scarce data can only make it more difficult to anticipate the moment of acting out, feeding in turn la psychose de l’attentat, the paranoid fear of another tragedy. In the majority of cases, the attackers kill themselves or are shot by the police, which prevents their being questioned about their motives, links with other individuals, groups, or networks, thereby hindering conclusions about the likeliness and predictability of similar events. The spectral nature of the threat, the mysterious, uncanny aura that surrounds the assailants’ behaviour and personality is reinforced, especially in the case of isolated killers known as “lone wolves.” Ethno-psychoanalyst George Devereux advocated an epistemology of complementarity according to which “while every phenomenon lends itself to at least two explanations, a psychological explanation and an anthropological one, both cannot be pursued simultaneously” (author’s italics).2 As a consequence, the interpretation of a given cultural fact should switch from one explanatory model to the other once the former has exhausted its heuristic potential. “It might be useful to note,” Devereux added, “that a ‘brute fact’ does not belong from the outset in the field of sociology nor in that of psychology. It is only by way of its explanation (in the framework of either of these sciences) that the brute fact turns into a psychological or sociological datum” (Devereux 1985, 23). Accounts by academics and journalists frequently fluctuate between the psychological and sociological registers, a focus either on mental pathologies (nihilism, death-drive, etc.) or on the assailants’ social and economic environments as breeding grounds for the criminalization of poverty. The fact that an isolated aggressor’s behaviour is often more readily explained by a psychological profile involving early childhood experiences, conflicted personal relations within the family, mental illness, or “asocial” rebellion lends credence to the Islamization of radicalism thesis, since many French jihadists were formerly non-practising Muslims or recent converts to Islam. On the other hand, a commando-style operation involving several actors, long in the planning, well-coordinated and flawlessly executed, and claimed by a known organization is likely to point to the religious

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roots of a global holy war, which in turn supports the rival radicalization of Islam approach. Both explanatory models can also be used to contrast al-Qaeda and ISIS. Bin Laden’s stateless, nomadic, transnational organization rose in response to the American occupation of Islam’s holy sites, and its targets were often eminently strategic or symbolic (US military bases in the Arabic Peninsula, the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, the White House). The Islamic State, on the other hand, was a territorialized entity whose politics were legitimized by a religious rhetoric and whose victims were often selected randomly. The responses to the question asked at the entrance of the Brussels underground station are not limited to carefully reasoned political or religious arguments. As we saw, conspiracy theories of various kinds have ritually purported to explain the hidden dynamics of terror, the paradigmatic examples remaining the attribution of 9/11 to a White House plot, a CIA false flag operation, or a fake-newsy propagandistic video based on holographic images and other special effects. In the case of Charlie Hebdo, there was also a lot of suspicion regarding the official versions of the rampage provided by public authorities and institutional media, including the substitution by the police of a different car from the one used by the assailants, the recovery close to the crime scene of an identity card supposedly lost by one of them, a stitchup by American and Israeli secret services, etc. Some of the most extreme instances of these narratives have involved supernatural forces, as when the Reverend Jerry Falwell declared that 9/11 was a divine retaliation for America’s sins, among them paganism, abortion, and homosexuality, for which the entire nation was called to repent. Beyond the multiple social and psychological sources of collective violence outlined in this book, from geopolitical conflicts and unequal economic development to employment, residential, and racial discrimination, and individual instances of mental illness, the unanswered question of the Brussels underground station remains tied for many people to the active presence of evil forces in the world. The Nice massacre was not the last terrorist action in recent French history, far from it, although it was the last of its magnitude, which could be attributed to a better performance from law enforcement and intelligence agencies in anticipating possible killings, as well as to the defeat of the Islamic State by Iranian, Russian, Iraqi, and Kurdish forces (with Western backing) between November 2017 and March 2019, even though tens of thousands of “active armed adherents” are said to remain active, from Mauritania to Indonesia. After July 2016,

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the number of victims and perpetrators decreased, the latter mostly lone wolves targeting police officers, members of the armed forces, and religious buildings. A priest was murdered and four people wounded in a small Catholic church in Normandy, and five women attempted to car bomb the highly symbolic site of Notre-Dame de Paris. Military patrols at le Carrousel du Louvre and one of the Paris airports were assaulted in February and March of 2017, and three officers and a member of the administrative staff were killed in the Paris police headquarters in October 2019 by an assailant whose ideology was ascribed to Salafist jihadism. All in all, ten instances of what the authorities officially labelled as attentats terroristes, some of them explicitly claimed by ISIS, targeted small towns and major urban centres from 2017 to 2019 as France continued to lead the group of Western nations most frequently hit by terrorist activities, ahead of the United States, Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Soft targets remained a major site of radicalized violence: three people (including the assailant) were killed in the main train station in Marseille, France’s second largest city, in October 2017, and an attack on the busy “Christmas Market” in Strasbourg led to five fatalities and eleven casualties in December 2018. Five people died in a series of shootings and subsequent hostagetaking in southwestern France in March 2018, and a bomb injured another fourteen people a few months later in Lyon. DÉJÀ VU

On 2 September 2020, the trial of fourteen accomplices of the Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly started in Paris, reopening the wounds from the tragedy that had shocked the country and the world almost six years before. The highly mediatized proceedings, described by some as a judicial mastodon of historical proportions, lasted four months and involved 150 witnesses and experts, 200 plaintiffs, ninety-four lawyers, and 171 volumes of procedure. Beyond the staging by the Republic of a most impressive deployment of its judiciary apparatus and the heart-rending sharing of their ordeal by survivors and the victims’ relatives, it seemed as though the entire country was waiting for its day in court. The day before the hearings were scheduled to begin, Charlie Hebdo published again the caricatures that had triggered the slaughter in its offices. Mass demonstrations denouncing the images and their authors erupted once again

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across the Muslim world, notably in Pakistan, India, and Turkey, while al-Qaeda called for retaliations against Charlie Hebdo and against France. A few weeks later, a man from Pakistan, apparently unaware that the satirical publication had long moved to another part of the city, wounded two people assumed to be employed by Charlie Hebdo across from the former offices of the magazine. On 16 October, a refugee from Chechnya stabbed and beheaded a middle-school history teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown some of the cartoons to his students as part of a class discussion on free speech. The killer had time to post a video of his slain victim online before being shot by the police minutes after the murder. Two weeks later, three parishioners were stabbed to death and several others wounded inside the Basilica in Nice, the site of the July 2016 mass killings. The assailant, seriously wounded by the police, had arrived in southern France two days earlier from his native Tunisia via Rome and the island of Lampedusa, a traditional port of entry of migrants and refugees from northern Africa into the European Union. A photograph of Samuel Paty’s murderer and downloads about the Islamic State were later found in his phone.3 In a kind of eerie replication, Samuel Paty’s death triggered a set of reactions similar to what the Charlie Hebdo trial had been commemorating almost daily since its beginning two months earlier. History as written and history as lived were suddenly collapsing into one another. The post-traumatic account from a not-so-distant past in the televised courthouse was re-enacted in real time through police raids, politicians’ statements, detentions and criminal prosecutions, and massive pro-speech demonstrations in major cities, with marchers waving placards that this time proclaimed I am a teacher and I am Samuel. The calls for retribution, the critique of the government’s past passivity in the face of unending terror, the outcry of Muslim governments and populations were all so familiar as if there was no way out of the cyclical, eternal return of the same. On 21 October, a ceremonial in honour of the slain teacher was held at the Sorbonne University in Paris. In his address, President Emmanuel Macron called Paty “a quiet hero” and posthumously awarded him the légion d’honneur, the highest decoration bestowed to a French citizen. The ceremony was meant to underscore the importance of public education in the historical construction of French democracy. Excerpts from Jean Jaurès’s century-old Lettre aux instituteurs (letter to primary school teachers) were read aloud to memorial-

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ize the creation of a compulsory, free, and secular elementary school system by the Third Republic in 1882, celebrate the crucial role played by those Charles Péguy had called “the black Hussars of the Republic” (male teachers at the time were dressed in long black smocks) in the basic instruction of a people finally freed from superstition, and underscore the science-based, humanistic, and critical thinking they had championed as the hallmark of a democratic education. Jaurès was a professor and former school teacher, a republican turned socialist and an icon of the Left after being killed for his internationalism and pacifism by a pro-war nationalist at the start of World War I. In La Dépêche de Toulouse, a regional newspaper, Jaurès had reminded his colleagues in 1888 that they “held in their hands the intelligence and the soul of the children” entrusted to them and were therefore “responsible to the Fatherland.” Their calling was not simply to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic because their students were “French and must know France, its geography and history: its body and soul. They will become citizens and must know what a free democracy is, the rights conferred and the duties imposed on them by the sovereignty of the nation. And they will be men, and need to have an idea of man, they have to know the root of our woes: egotism in its multiple forms; and what is the premise of our greatness: determination mixed with tenderness.”4 The letter was subsequently read in schools across the country during ceremonies that at times led to threats, objections to Paty’s decision to show the cartoons in class, and interruptions of the silent tribute to the teacher by dissenting students in more than 400 cases, according to the minister of education.5 In remarks reminiscent of those of his predecessor François Hollande in 2015, Emmanuel Macron declared during a visit to Paty’s middle school that “our compatriot was executed because he was teaching students freedom of speech”; his interior minister claimed that the teacher had been “the target of a fatwa,” and the minister of education repeatedly stressed the need to “recapture” public schools from the growing threat of “separatism,” a substitute from the classic “communitarianism” (presumably to underscore divisiveness rather than belonging). In the following days, an anti-terrorist investigation into the murder led to widespread measures against individuals, networks, and associations. Fifteen people, including the parent of a student from the school and an imam who had launched a social media campaign against Paty deemed indirectly responsible for his death, as

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well as relatives of the killer, were held in police custody; fifty-one associations charged with being close to the Islamist movement were threatened with dissolution, including the CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia in France), about which the interior minister was reported to have declared that “a number of elements lead us to believe that it is an enemy of the Republic”; and the government ordered the expulsion of 231 individuals on record for involvement in radicalized or terrorist activities.6 The Macron administration also sponsored a new piece of legislation that would balance the free exercise of religion with the need for a democracy to protect its citizens from those who wanted to impose their beliefs by force, to combine law and order and the “strengthening of republican principles” with the promotion of “equality of opportunity” and the fight against discrimination. The proposal included placing greater control over mosques and requiring that imams be trained and certified in France. The new legislative project failed to gain consensus, attracting criticisms from all sides, from those on the right who felt that the absence of direct reference to Islamic radicalism was one more concession to the communitarian Left’s campaigns against Islamophobia, to those concerned with the curtailing of civil liberties by more stringent measures against social media, and to those who feared the increased control by the state of places of worship, religious associations, and confessional private schools, seen as a dangerous departure from the 1905 law on the separation of the churches and the state, whose first article ensured “freedom of conscience” and guaranteed “the free exercise of religion under the provisos enacted hereafter in the interest of public order.”7 Samuel Paty’s murder also furthered existing divisions within Emmanuel Macron’s centrist majority and among opposition parties on its left, reviving the 2015–16 proliferation of dissent described in chapter 6. In November 2019, several leaders of the Greens, the Communist Party, and the leftist La France Insoumise had participated in a large demonstration protesting the attack on a mosque in southwestern France by sympathizers of the far-right Rassemblement National. The march became controversial after one of the organizers was filmed shouting Allahu Akbar (God is the greatest) in a megaphone, stating that the repeated cry, joined in chorus by the crowd, simply meant that “we are proud to be Muslims and to be French citizens ... and are sick and tired of the media passing this religious expression off as a declaration of war.” Anticipating some criticism from mem-

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bers of his own party and from the Socialists, who had declined to join the demonstration, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise and a notorious long-time proponent of secularism, held a press conference before the march to deplore the exacerbated “atmosphere of hatred against Muslims in France” and declared that “we must surround those who are singled out with affection and fraternity. We need to make common cause and close ranks. The homeland only becomes republican from the moment everyone finds a place in it.”8 The remarks failed to settle the expected dispute, and in the months between the march and Paty’s death, a growing chorus of voices within the Socialist Party (and elsewhere) condemned the rise of an islamo-gauchiste wave of compromise with Islamist radicalism within the Left. Representatives of French Islam were equally polarized: while the imam of a mosque in the Paris suburbs accused Samuel Paty of being “a thug,” several organizations condemned the murder in no uncertain terms. The president of the French Council of the Muslim Cult denounced “the irruptions of a terrorism claiming a connection to Islam, a ferocious worldwide ‘pandemic’” and emphasized that “French Muslims are horrified by this abject crime,” and thirty signatories of a letter from the Council of the Mosques of the Rhone region publicly declared their commitment to “strengthen the study of the ideological underpinnings of extremist thought and the struggle against those who fuel it, feed it, and finance it.” Another group of imams called “Muslim youth to turn in their spiritual quest to qualified imams and theologians in order not to fall prey to obscurantism.”9 International reactions also had an air of déjà vu. Governments from Muslim-majority countries decried both the murder and Macron’s defiant defence of publishing the cartoons. The head of the Chechen republic accused the French president of “forcing people into terrorism, pushing people towards it, not leaving them any choice, creating the conditions for the growth of extremism in young people’s heads. You can boldly call yourself the leader and inspiration of terrorism in your country,” while Turkish leader Recep Tayiip Erdoğan questioned Macron’s mental sanity, called for a boycott of French goods, and claimed that Muslims in France were “subjected to a lynch campaign similar to that against Jews in Europe before World War II.” Some disagreements, although less severe, also were manifest across the transatlantic divide. Responding to a question about the

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right to show the caricatures of the Prophet, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that “freedom of expression is not without limits. We owe it to ourselves to act with respect for others and to seek not to arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet.” Trudeau’s remarks drew some criticism in France and Canada, and BBC News later reported that Trudeau and Macron were in the process “of mending fences” over the remarks.10 Macron kept on voicing his disappointment that France was increasingly isolated on the world scene as opposed to the strong international support it had received five years earlier, when several heads of state and foreign dignitaries took part in the massive I am Charlie rally of 11 January 2015, in sharp contrast to the combination of embarrassed comments from democratic leaders and severe reprobation from the likes of Erdoğan. The intervening five years between the two periods had seen both a sharp increase in people killed in terror attacks in France (more than 250) as compared with the rest of Europe and a growing sense that the French had it coming because of their inability to deal with difference, whether racial, sexual, religious, or otherwise. Macron’s ire was especially directed at the US media, much too prone, in his view, to make the French government the villain with a systematic focus on the failure of its policy toward Muslims. In a phone call to Ben Smith, a New York Times media columnist, he complained that the “Anglo-American press” preferred to decry the failures of the French integration system rather than the series of lethal actions against his compatriots. “When France was attacked five years ago, every nation in the world supported us ... So when I see, in that context, several newspapers I believe are from countries that share our values – journalists who write in a country that is heir to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution – when I see them legitimizing this violence, and saying that the heart of the problem is that France is racist and Islamophobic, then I say the founding principles have been lost.” Macron concluded that Americans simply did not understand “the French model” and proceeded to set the record straight. The United States, he argued, “used to be segregationist before it moved to a multiculturalist model, which is essentially about coexistence of different ethnicities and religions next to one another. Our model is universalist and not multiculturalist ... In our society, I don’t care whether someone is Black, yellow, white, whether they are Catholic or Muslim, a person is first and foremost a citizen.”11

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The new instance of hemispheric drift occasioned by Samuel Paty’s death at times got out of hand, with some American journalists in the New Yorker or the Washington Post talking of “state atheism” or equating counter-terrorist activities in France with Stalinism and Maoism (Middle Eastern autocrats prefer the reference to Nazism), while the French media railed against “the canon of Yankee progressivism” bent on spreading disinformation about government plans to issue an identification number to all Muslim children born in France (“Que font les fact-checkers?” quipped the weekly Marianne).12 2001 and 2015 have been in large part a tale of two exceptionalisms. After September 11, many Americans wondered “why do they hate us so much?” when their country prided itself on spreading democracy, prosperity, and human rights across the globe, and now Emmanuel Macron was trying to explain the French difference to skeptical allies and outraged critics alike. Fifteen years ago, in the introduction to her book on The Politics of the Veil, Joan Wallach Scott had warned against taking at face value the simple and simplistic oppositions offered by the supporters of the ban on headscarves in public schools: “Traditional versus modern, fundamentalism versus secularism, church versus state, private versus public, particular versus universal, group versus individual, cultural pluralism versus national unity, identity versus equality.” “These dichotomies,” Scott went on, “do not capture the complexities of either Islam or ‘the West.’ Rather, they are polemics that in fact create their own reality: incompatible cultures, a clash of civilizations ... Culture was said to be the cause of the differences between France and its Muslims. In fact, I argue that the idea of culture was the effect of a very particular, historically specific political discourse” (Scott 2007, 5, 7). Macron’s binary contrast between “universalism” and “multiculturalism” based on essentialized, supposedly homogeneous national cultures was neither new nor entirely accurate: white supremacists and ethno-nationalists in America have never been fond of cultural and religious pluralism, to say the least, and French reactionaries have rejected Enlightenment universals since the end of the eighteenth century. Not to mention the fact that France’s supposedly colourblind citizens are not always familiar with what their country’s secularist tradition really entails, despite the omnipresence of the supposedly untranslatable, and thus uniquely French, signifier laïcité in the debates over national identity for the past thirty years.13 A recent TV broadcast on the “weighty silence surrounding Islamism at

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school” concluded its story with the Ministry of Education’s acknowledgment that many of its teachers held “misconceptions” regarding the (admittedly disputed and often controversial) meaning of Frenchstyle secularism, making it necessary to conduct some 50,000 sessions of continued education on the topic for middle school and high school teachers in 2019, for a total of 728,000 educators in the nation’s secondary public schools.14 Despite Emmanuel Macron’s taking offence at the statement that “France is racist and Islamophobic,” there are indeed racists in France, including within the police, as well as employment discrimination and housing segregation directed at racialized minorities and a tendency among many French people to equate the whole of Islam with fanaticism and political radicalization. The latest attempt by the government to beef up anti-terrorist activities could not ignore at the same time the socio-cultural roots of Islamophobia and its discontents, since there can be no peace if there is no justice and no security without furthering equal opportunity, the educational and economic advancement of disadvantaged minorities. As it is, the country is caught not only in an unresolved tension between two supposedly incompatible principles of liberal democracy, religious freedom and freedom of speech but, more importantly, as a participant in a television interview after the murder of Samuel Paty put it, in a seemingly uncontrolled spiral of violence, recrimination, and outrage. The final verdict of the four-month long trial of the accomplices of the Kouachi brothers and Amédy Coulibaly was disappointing to many in view of the emotional and institutional stakes invested in the proceedings and perhaps also because of the expectation among some that they would put the issue to rest once and for all, as if the administration of justice could bring an end to terror. The harshest sentences given to four of the defendants (thirty, twenty, eighteen, and thirteen years) fell short of those requested by the prosecution, who had asked for lifelong imprisonment in some cases, the others being condemned to prison terms ranging from four to ten years. In the eyes of many commentators and legal analysts, the prosecution had failed to establish the exact origin of the weapons used by the assailants and, more importantly, to convince the court that the accused did not have to know or share the goals of those they assisted to be convicted of “complicity with terrorist crimes.” The discrepancy between the historical, symbolic dimension of the crimes and the profiles of the defendants, petty criminals and low-level drug-traffickers, led a histo-

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rian of the French justice system to remark that rather than illustrating Hannah Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil” to describe Adolph Eichmann’s Nazi war crimes, the proceedings had merely exemplified “the triviality of evil.”15 The history of non–state-sponsored terrorism shows that it comes in (shock) waves that eventually subside as a result of government repression and changes in the social and political contexts of a specific form of insurgent radicalization. Past examples include Russian nihilism and French anarchism in the 1880s and more recent separatist and insurrectional violence in Europe (Irish Republican Army [IRA]), Basque Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna [ETA], Italian Red Brigades, German Red Army Faction), Latin America (Peruvian Shining Path, Colombian FARC), and Asia (Ahum Shinrikyo in Japan). The current Islamist version is based on the complex interaction of religion, race, ideology, and the economics of globalization this book has examined in the case of France, and it is likely to remain a chronic feature of our lives, at least as long as its immediate and remote causes continue to frame our chaotic present.

Introduction

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 2 3 4

Cited in Dosse (2018, 17). On this last issue, see Stiegler (2003). See Mathy (2017, 105–29). This was Thierry Meyssan’s L’effroyable imposture (2002a), published in English as 9/11: The Big Lie (2002b). 5 From Colombani (2002, 153). An English translation of the article can be found in the November 2001 issue of the World Press Review (vol. 48, no. 11), http://media.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp018302. html. CHAPTER ONE

1 On the Iraq war, see, for example, Derrida (2005). 2 See, for example, Desuin (2017). 3 An English translation of the article can be found in the November 2001 issue of the World Press Review (vol. 48, no. 11). http//media.leeds.ac .uk/papers/vp018302.html. 4 “Stunned by the election of Donald Trump,” which sent a “message to the American establishment,” Adler later wrote yet another book (La Chute de l’Empire américain) about the collapse of the US global leadership from a French perspective, fourteen years after Emmanuel Todd’s After the Empire. On the growing disillusionment of French “neoconservatives” with the gradual decline of American power after the invasion of Iraq, see my further comments at the end of chapter 4. 5 Jacques Derrida also drew a connection between terror and territory in relation to the rhizomatic, deterritorialized, cybernetic nature of the

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Notes to Pages 49–65

global networks of the new jihadist organizations: “The United States and Europe, London, or Berlin, are also sanctuaries, places of training or formation and information for all the ‘terrorists’ of the world. No geography, no ‘territorial’ determination, is thus pertinent any longer for locating the seat of these new technologies of transmission or aggression ... ‘Terrorist’ attacks already no longer need planes, bombs, or kamikazes: it is enough to infiltrate a strategically important computer system and introduce a virus or some other disruptive element to paralyze the economic, military, and political resources of an entire country or continent. And this can be attempted from just about anywhere on earth ... The relationship between earth, terra, territory, and terror, has changed, and it is necessary to know that this is because of knowledge, that is, because of technoscience” (2003, 101). There is no linguistic, etymological basis for Derrida’s philosophical rapprochement, however: terra comes from the Sanskrit root ters- (dry land) and terror from the IndoEuropean tres- (Greek τρέω, to flee from fear). See Max Weber, The City, tr. and ed. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: Free Press,1966); Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Kurt H. Wolff, tr. and ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1950); Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: Cassell, 1943); March Bloch, Feudal Society, tr. L.A. Manyon (Abindgon and New York: Routledge, 2014); and Claude Lefort, “L’Europe, civilisation urbaine,” Esprit, 303 (2014): 225–43. René Girard et le problème du Mal. Textes rassemblés par Michel Deguy et Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Paris: Grasset, 1982). For a complete transcription of bin Laden’s interview with ABC’s John Miller in May 1998, see https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline /shows/binladen/who/interview.html (accessed 13 January 2020). Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37:46. For a minute-by-minute (and sometimes second-by-second!) chronology, see http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/ Timeline_for_the_day_of_the September_11_attacks. Symbolic and diabolic as a pair of opposites are both etymologically derived from the Greek verb βάλλειν (ballein), meaning “to throw” or “to put.” To symbolize is to join together, while the διαϐολος (devil) has the power to divide, to rend asunder. The demonization of dissent is as powerful a consensus-builder as the diabolization of the enemy.

Notes to Pages 79–99

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CHAPTER T WO

1 In the Diacritik interview, Taillandier herself throws doubt on the official version of 9/11: “The book chapters weave the narratives together around the common themes that emerged from these echoes [among the various trajectories of the main characters]: cartography, exile, faith, common narratives ... When one sets these themes one after the other, there appears a totally different story of 9/11 than the one we think we know ... I am free from all pretense to factual truth – and by the way, I like to think that I may have written a book on 9/11 that will be totally unreadable in thirty years, because by then we will have learned that ‘the official version’ was nothing but a web of lies. But perhaps some human truth will continue to be valid in it. I hope so.” 2 The charge of “cognitive relativism” echoes the usual complaint by foundationalist philosophers that the postmodernist questioning of the validity of truth claims by science or common sense sees all statements about culture, religion, or politics as socially and historically constructed and therefore relative to a particular place and time. As a consequence, the generalized skepticism about the foundation of truth and the lack of simple, direct equation between language and reality, words and things, ends up preventing anyone to pass a value judgment on a particular belief or practice. 3 See, for example, Susan Dean, “Physicist Says Heat Substance Felled WTC,” Desert Morning News, 10 April 2006; D. Dunbar and B. Reagan, eds, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand up to the Facts (New York: Hearst, 2006); Niels H. Harrit et al., “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe,” The Open Chemical Physics Journal, vol. 2, 13 February 2009. 4 “Bin-Laden-Video: Falschübersetzung als Beweismittel?” WDR, Das Erste, MONITOR, No. 485, 20 December 2001; see also “Osama Tape Appears Fake, Experts Conclude,” Looking Glass News, 1 June 2006, http://www .lookingglassnews.org/viewstory.php?storyid=6233. 5 See the fifteen-page document entitled “Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba [includes cover memoranda], March 13, 1962,” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news /20010430. The quote above is on page 5. 6 http://www.reopen911.info/11-septembre/grande-manifestation-a-parisle-dimanche-11-septembre. 7 http://www.reopen911.info/11-septembre/sondage-h-e-c-pour-reopen 911-les-francais-et-le-11-9-11-questions-sur-le-11-septembre, 8 September

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2011. On the German survey, see Kurt Nimmo, “Nearly 90 Percent of Germans Do Not Believe Official 9/11 Fairy Tale,” http://www.infowars .com/nearly-90-percent-of-germans-do-not-believe-official-911-fairy-tale. CHAPTER THREE

1 Rifkin and Garton Ash are cited in Richard Bernstein, “The World: Does Europe Need to Get a Life?” New York Times, 8 August 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/weekinreview/the-world-doeseurope-need-to-get-a-life.html. 2 Fukuyama (1992). For earlier studies of the philosophical (Hegelian) genealogy of the concept, see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel; and Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism. 3 See Bruce Drake, “More Americans Say U.S. Failed to Achieve its Goals in Iraq,” Pew Research Center, 12 June 2014, https://www.pewresearch .org/staff/bruce-drake/page/3. 4 For the entire document, see https://www.europarl.europa.eu/Europe 2004/textes/2005-01-10-brochure-constitution-en-v02.pdf. 5 Mathy (2003). See, for example, Alan Riding, “Where Is the Glory That France Was?” New York Times, 14 January 1996; and Roger Cohen, “France’s Allegiance: To Things French, Like Hypocrisy,” New York Times, 24 August 1997. 6 On multiculturalism and its discontents, see the introduction and chapter 5 of Mathy(2000). 7 For the classic study of the three “families” of the post-revolutionary Right in France (Legitimism, Orleanism, and Bonapartism), see Rémond (1969). CHAPTER FOUR

1 Gopnik subsequently joined the editorial board of Lévy’s review La Règle du jeu (The Rule of the Game) in 2009. 2 “A la Todd” refers to the publication two years earlier of Emmanuel Todd’s Après l’empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain (After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order), the latest (at the time) in a long series of French essays chronicling the expected collapse of the United States’ global superpower status. 3 “Cette guerre n’est pas la nôtre,” Le Monde, 21–2 October 2001; “Cette guerre est la nôtre,” Le Monde, 8 November 2001.

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4 Michel Taubmann. L’Affaire Guinguoin. Paris: Souny, 1994; (with Ramin Parham) Histoire secrète de la révolution iranienne. Iran, les clés pour comprendre (A Secret History of the Iranian Revolution. Iran: Keys to an Understanding). Paris: Denoël, 2009; La Bombe et le Coran. Une biographie du president iranien Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (The Bomb and the Quran. A Biography of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). Paris: Éditions du Moment, 2008; Stéphanie Courtois et al. (1999). 5 “Nous ne manifesterons pas ce samedi!” (We Will Not Demonstrate This Coming Saturday), Le Figaro, 15 February 2003. 6 “With Washington and London, for the Iraqi People,” Le Figaro, 4 April 2003. 7 Taguieff, a member of Le Cercle de l’Oratoire, has written extensively on racism and anti-Semitism past and present, anti-Zionism, conspiracy theories, populism, antiracism, and “intellectual terrorism” in France. His most recent book is L’Imposture décoloniale. Science imaginaire et pseudo-antiracisme (The Decolonial Deception. Imaginary Science and Pseudo-Antiracism), Paris: L’Observatoire, 2020. 8 Jean Birnbaum, “‘Le Meilleur des mondes,’ une voix pour l’Amérique,” Le Monde, 23 March 2006. 9 Eric Aeschimann, “Les Meilleurs amis de l’Amérique” (America’s Best Friends), Libération, 9 May 2006. 10 See Maurice Szafran, “Les néoconservateurs à la française se démasquent, enfin!” (The French-Style Neoconservatives Finally Throw Down the Mask), Marianne, 10 June 2006. 11 Bruno Tertrais, “Encore un siècle de puissance américaine?” (Another Century of American Power?), Le Meilleur des mondes 5 (Fall 2007): 55–9. On European–American relations, see also by the same author, Europe/Etats-Unis: valeurs communes ou divorce culturel? (Europe/United States: Common Values or Cultural Break?), Fondation Robert Schuman (October 2006). 12 Nathan Glazer, “Neoconservative from the Start,” The Public Interest, spring 2005. 13 Mead is quoted in G. John Ikenberry, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Thomas G. Knock, and Tony Smith, The Crisis of American Foreign Policy. Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 31. French political scientist Pierre Hassner has for his part coined the term “Wilsonisme botté” (jack-booted Wilsonianism) to describe neoconservative policies. See “Le Second Bush, un Wilsonisme botté,” Libération, 4 March 2003. 14 See Vincent Jauvert, La face cachée du quai d’Orsay. Enquête sur un

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Notes to Pages 157–174

ministère à la dérive, Paris: Robert Laffont, 2016. (The Hidden Side of French Foreign Affairs. Investigating a Ministry Adrift). Le quai d’Orsay in Paris is the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Among other things, Jauvert documented the ascendancy of the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (Foundation for Strategic Defense), a think tank supportive of the Atlantic Alliance, of which previously mentioned Bruno Tertrais, a member since 2001, is the current deputy director. Renaud Girard, “La Diplomatie française doit en finir avec le néoconservatisme,” (French Diplomacy Must Do Away with Neoconservatism), FigaroVox, 25 March 2016. “Les Américains risquent de mourir de leurs propres défauts” (Americans Are Likely to Perish from Their Own Faults), France 24 channel, 21 December 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=IWyUlevj8Y. Pascal Bruckner, “Le XXIe siècle ne sera pas américain,” Le Monde, 14 December 2017. “Point de vue: la faute, par Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann et Romain Goupil,” Le Monde, 14 April 2003. Isaac Chotine, “Bernard-Henri Lévy on the Rights of Women and of the Accused,” New Yorker, 18 March 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news /q-and-a/bernard-henri-levy-on-the-rights-of-women-and-of-the-accused. CHAPTER FIVE

1 See, for example, for the single year 2004, Eric Laurent, La guerre des Bush: les secrets inavouables d’un conflit, Paris: Plon, 2004 (The War of the Bushes: The Unconfessable Secrets of a Conflict), and Le monde secret de Bush. La religion, les affaires, les réseaux occultes, Paris: Plon, 2004 (Bush’s Secret World. Religion, Scandals, Hidden Networks) ; William Blum, Les guerres scélérates, trans. L. Perrineau, Paris: Parangon, 2004 (French translation of Killing Hope. US Military and CIA Interventions since WWII]; Scott Ritter and Guy Ducornet, Les mensonges de George W. Bush, Paris: Éd. du Rocher, 2004 (George W. Bush’s Lies); Christophe Grauwin, La croisade des camelots: ou les aventures financières et bien peu recommandables de George Bush et de ses compagnons, Paris: Fayard, 2004 (The Peddlers’ Crusade, or the Financial and Quite Unsavory Adventures of George Bush and His Companions). 2 “Fous de Jésus. Les évangéliques à la conquête du monde,” Courrier international no. 735, 1 December 2004.

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3 “Religious Symbols in France,” New York Times, 20 December 2003. https://www.nytimes.com /2003/12/20/opinion/religious-symbols-infrance.html. 4 See, for example, Clarisse Fabre and Eric Fassin, Liberté, égalité, sexualités. Actualité politique des questions sexuelles, Paris: Belfond, 2003 (Liberty, Equality, Sexualities. Political Relevance of Sexual Issues); and Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, eds, De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française, Paris: La Découverte, 2006 (From the Social Question to the Racial Question? Representing French Society). 5 I have examined symptoms of déclinisme and sinistrose in Melancholy Politics (2011). 6 For a overview of open letters to Le Nouvel Observateur from a variety of evangelical organizations, see “Suite au dossier paru dans Le Nouvel Observateur du 26/02/04.” http://www.vbru.net/src/divers/nouvel _obs.htm. 7 Quoted in “Suite au dossier paru dans le Nouvel Observateur.” 8 “Les Évangéliques: ‘une secte qui veut conquérir le monde’?” Info-sectes, March 2004, http://www.info-sectes.org/faq/nouvelobs.htm. See also “revue de presse,” atheisme.free.fr, http://atheisme.free.fr/Revue_presse /Evangeliques_nouvel_observateur.htm. 9 Cited in Simon Schama, “The Unloved American, Two Centuries of Alienating Europe,” New Yorker, 3 March 2003: 34. 10 See, for example, “White Evangelicals Voted Overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, Exit Polls Show,” Washington Post, 9 November 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11/09/exitpolls-show-white-evangelicals-voted-overwhelmingly-for-donald-trump /?utm_term=.1cd8899d1551. 11 See “Bush to Become Nation’s Third Methodist President,” Beliefnet, 16 January 2001, https://www.beliefnet.com/news/politics/2001/01/bush-tobecome-nations-third-methodist-president.aspx. 12 “The Spirituality of George W. Bush,” Public Broadcasting Service, 29 April 2004, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jesus/president /spirituality.html. 13 Régis Debray, “The French Lesson,” New York Times, 23 February 2003. 14 Olivier de Trogoff, “L’implantation progressive des églises évangélistes dans le monde musulman, ” Les Clés du Moyen-Orient, 3 November 2014. On Algeria, see also Fatiha Kaouès, Convertir le monde arabe: l’offensive évangélique (Converting the Arab World: The Evangelical Offensive), Paris : CNRS Editions, 2018.

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15 Fath (2004) “Réception.” From the same author, see also Billy Graham, pape protestant? Paris: Albin Michel, 2002. 16 See Corwin Smidt et al., “‘What Does the Lord Require?’ Evangelicals and the 2004 Presidential Vote,” in Rozell and Whitney (2007). 17 David Houstin, “650,000 chrétiens évangéliques en France,” L’Observateur chrétien, 20 June, 2017, https://chretien.news/chretiens-evangeliques-enfrance. 18 See Jean-Luc Mouton and Jean-Paul Willaime, “Sondage: les protestants en France en 2010,” Réforme, L’hebdomadaire protestant d’actualité, 18 November 2010. https://www.reforme.net/religion/protestantisme /2010/11/18/journal-11182010-3392-actualites-religions-sacree-famille. 19 Quoted in Neff, 7, http://www.accesstudyabroad.fr/medias/files/neffevangeliques-et-politique-chap-8.pdf. CHAPTER SIX

1 Robin Panfilli, “Les Avertissements se multiplient autour d’un ‘11Septembre à la française.’” Slate, 2 October 2015. 2 Petra Gümplová, “Let’s Not Make Paris the French 9/11,” openDemocracy, 22 December 2015. 3 Derk Jan Eppik, “The French 9/11,” London Centre for Policy Research, 7 January 2015. 4 Conor Friedersdorf, “Paris and the Lessons of 9/11,” The Atlantic, 15 November 2015. 5 Matt Welsh, “Op-Ed: After the French 9/11, Le Patriot Act,” Los Angeles Times, 30 December 2015. 6 See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Contre la dépression nationale: entretiens avec Philippe Petit [Against the National Depression: Talks with Philippe Petit], Paris: Textuel, 1998. 7 See also Danilo Martucelli, La Société singulariste [Singularist Society], Paris: Armand Colin, 2020. 8 See http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/jan/10/francoishollande-france-speech-charlie-hebdo-paris. 9 Mass violence usually reactivates the imagination of the body politic in important ways. US representatives in Congress famously sang the national anthem in a show of bipartisan unity in the aftermath of 9/11, and the massacre in the historical Black church in Charleston, NC, led to a renewed struggle over the Confederate flag as a symbol and source of division. A large majority of North Carolina state representatives, Democrats and Republicans alike, voted to remove the flag from the

Notes to Pages 214–220

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Capitol grounds in an attempt to heal the wounds of a community again torn apart by racial prejudice. On the polemic generated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks on 11 January 2015 that the state of Israel is the proper home of all the Jews of France threatened by anti-Semitism and the related discussion on the difference between “Juif français” and “Français juif,” see http://www.i24 news.tv/fr/actu /international /europe/62526-150227-juif-francais-oufrancais-juif. http://www.gouvernement.fr/hommage-aux-victimes-des-attentats-discours-de-manuel-valls-version-augmentee. For an English translation, see http://www.gouvernement.fr/en/tribute-to-the-victims-of-the-attacks. Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, defeated an invading army from Muslim Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) between Poitiers and Tours in southwestern France in 732. Historians are divided over Edward Gibbon’s famous claim in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Martel’s failure would have allowed Islam to conquer the whole of Europe. For obvious reasons, that was the National Front’s preferred interpretation of the famous battle, and Charles Martel has figured prominently, alongside Joan of Arc, in the political mythology of the party. John Linchfield, “Quenelle Comedian Dieudonné Praises Terrorist Killer: ‘As Far as I Am Concerned, I Feel I Am Charlie Coulibaly,’” The Independent, 12 January 2015. Mathilde Siraud, “Charlie-Hebdo: Besancenot refuse de marcher avec Hollande et Sarkozy, Le Figaro, 9 January 2015, http://www.lefigaro.fr /politique/le-scan/citations/2015/01/09/25002-20150109ARTFIG00102charlie-hebdo-besancenot-refuse-de-marcher-avec-hollande-etsarkozy.php. See, for example “Vu d’Afrique. Présidents africains à Paris: pourquoi pas une telle mobilisation contre Boka Haram?” [A view from Africa. African Presidents in Paris: Why Not a Similar Mobilization against Boka Haram?], Courrier international, 12 January 2015. “Apologie du terrorisme: la justice face à l’urgence,” Le Monde, 22 January 2015, http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/01/22 /apologie-du-terrorisme-la-justice-face-a-l-urgence_4560603_3224.html. The term “bobos” (short for “bourgeois bohemians”) refers to the urban, educated liberals and progressives lampooned by American conservative political commentator David Brooks in his Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Although Brooks’s study was limited to the American context,

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the French readily appropriated the term to qualify the left-leaning professionals who, among other things, helped to elect the first socialist mayor of Paris in 2001. See, for example, Bertrand Rothé, De l’abandon au mépris: comment le PS a tourné le dos à la classe ouvrière, [From Abandonment to Contempt: How the Socialist Party Turned Its Back on the Working Class], Paris: Seuil, 2013; Eric Fassin, Gauche, l’avenir d’une désillusion [The Left and the Future of a Disillusion], Paris: Textuel, 2014. Ariel Kyrou and Mounir Fatmy, “11 janvier: l’enjeu est la liberté d’offenser, et rien d’autre” [January 11: The Stakes Are the Freedom to Offend, and Nothing Else], Libération, 13 May 2015, https://www.liberation .fr/societe/2015/05/13/11-janvier-l-enjeu-est-la-liberte-d-offenser-et-riend-autre_1308853. Ariane Bonzon, “Daech déteste le hasard,” Slate, 14 November 2015. On the growing economic and cultural gap between urban elites and those living in peripheral suburban and rural areas in France, see Christophe Guilluy, La France périphérique. Comment on a sacrifié les classes populaires [Peripheral France. How the Popular Classes Were Sacrificed], Paris: Flammarion, 2014. “Le ‘11 septembre français’, c’était plus les attentats de novembre que ceux de janvier” [The “French September 11” Was More about the Attacks of November than those of January], L’Humanité, 6 January 2016. “François contre Hollande” [François vs Hollande], Le Point, 12 October 2016. Olivier Roy, “Le Djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste,” Le Monde, 23 November 2015. Olivier Roy, “Il faut distinguer violence politique et violence religieuse” [One Must Distinguish Political Violence from Religious Violence], Chronik, 17 November 2017. Gilles Kepel and Bernard Rougier, “‘Radicalisations’ et ‘Islamophobie’: le roi est nu,” Libération, 14 March 2016. Bernard Rougier, “L’Islamisme est un projet hégémonique,” Le Point, 1 February 2020. See also Rougier (2020). Christophe Boltansky, “Gilles Kepel vs. Olivier Roy, la guerre secrète des experts en terrorisme” [Gilles Kepel vs Olivier Roy, the Secret War of the Terrorism Experts], Vanity Fair, 29 January 2019. Marie-Anne Valfort, “Radicalisation de l’islam et islamisation de la radicalité sont des phénomènes complémentaires,” Le Monde, 1 June 2018.

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30 François Burgat, “Réponse à Olivier Roy: les non-dits de ‘l’islamisation de la radicalité,’” Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 November 2016. 31 Farhad Khosrokhavar and Jérôme Ferret, “La Fausse alternative: la radicalisation de l’islam ou l’islamisation de la radicalité, Tribune France , vol. 3, 11 February 2020. 32 Fabien Truong, “Le Monde social a horreur du vide, et l’islam a trouvé ici une place de choix,” [The Social World Abhors a Vacuum, and Islam Has Found Here a Special Place], Les Inrockuptibles, 16 December 2017. See also his Radicalized Loyalties: Becoming Muslim in the West, trans. Seth Ackerman, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018. 33 “A Clash of Loyalties in the Parisian Suburbs: An Interview with Fabien Truong,” Jacobin, 21 July 2019. 34 Roy, “Il faut distinguer violence politique et violence religieuse.” CONCLUSION

1 “Photos. Attentats de Bruxelles. La population peine à reprendre une vie normale” [Brussels Attacks. The Local Population Has a Hard Time Going Back to Normal Life], Le Républicain Lorrain, 24 March 2016, https://www.republicain-lorrain.fr/actualite/2016/03/24/attentats-debruxelles-la-population-peine-a-reprendre-une-vie-normale-dans-uneville-blessee. 2 See François Laplantine, “Thinking between Two Shores: Georges Devereux,” Books and Ideas, Paris: Collège de France, 27 October 2014, https://booksandideas.net/Thinking-Between-Shores-Georges.html, accessed 29 March 2020. 3 “Attentat dans une église de Nice: le Tunisien Aouissaoui inculpé et écroué” [Attack in a Church in Nice: Tunisian Aouissaoui Indicted and Detained], Agence France-Presse and L’Orient-Le Jour, 7 December 2020, https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1243903/attentat-de-la-basiliquede-nice-brahim-aouissaoui-mis-en-examen-et-ecroue-parquetantiterroriste.html. 4 https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/nicolas-bersihand/lettre-jean-jauresinstituteurs_b_5927048.html. 5 https://www.ladepeche.fr/2020/11/06/hommage-a-samuel-paty-400violations-de-la-minute-de-silence-selon-blanquer-9185786.php. 6 Mustapha Benfodil, “Les Réseaux islamistes dans le viseur des enquêteurs” [Islamist Networks in the Investigators’ Sights], El Watan, 20 October 2020.

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7 For the complete text of the law, see https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda /id/JORFTEXT000000508749 /2021-01-24. 8 Abel Mestre, “La Gauche presque au complet à la manifestation contre l’islamophobie” [Almost Everyone on the Left at the Demonstration against Islamophobia], Le Monde, 10 November 2019. 9 Louise Couvelaire, “Après l’attentat de Conflans, de nombreux imams condamnent l’assassinat de Samuel Paty” [After the Attack in Conflans, Many Imams Condemn the Killing of Samuel Paty], Le Monde, 19 October 2020. 10 “Trudeau and Macron Speak after Cartoon Remark Controversy,” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54774813. 11 Ben Smith, “The President vs. the American Media. After Terrorist Attacks, France’s Leader Accuses the English-Language Media of ‘Legitimizing This Violence,’” New York Times, 15 November 2020. 12 Louis Nadeau, “Après les attentats islamistes en France, la presse américaine fait le procès de la laïcité [After the Islamist Attacks in France, the American Media Put Secularism on Trial], Marianne, 4 November 2020. 13 Regarding the much-touted exceptionalism of secularist views in France, Joan Wallach Scott has argued that Muslim claims have been “rebuffed on the ground that satisfying them would undermine laïcité, the French version of secularism, which its apologists offer as so uniquely French as to be untranslatable. Any word has specific connotations according to its linguistic context, of course. Nevertheless, laïcité, the French version of ‘secularism,’ is no less translatable than any other terms. It is part of the mythology of the specialness and superiority of French republicanism – the same mythology that paradoxically offers French universalism as different from all others – to insist that laïcité can only be used in its original tongue” (Scott, 2007, 15). 14 “Islamisme à l’école: le poids du silence” [Islamism at School: The Burden of Silence], franceinfo, 12 October 2020, https://www.francetvinfo.fr /societe/religion/video-islamisme-a-lecole-le-poids-du-silence_4202365 .html. 15 Julie Brafman, “Attentats de janvier 2015: l’histoire d’un procès pour l’histoire” [The January 2015 Attacks: The Story of a Historical Trial], Libération, 16 December 2020.

Introduction

263

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Index

Adler, Alexandre, 6, 7, 14, 36–42, 45, 139–40, 153, 165, 251, 263; and born-again Baptists, 40; and American foreign policy, 40; and anti-Americanism, 39; and Armaggedon, 38, 54 Aeschimann, Eric, 148 al-Qaeda, 17, 32–3, 39, 44–5, 64, 92, 96–7, 211, 227, 241–3 American exceptionalism, 63–4, 107–8, 160, 163–4, 174, 268 anti-Americanism, 30, 35, 45, 135, 139, 166 anti-anti-Americans, 2, 14, 24, 28, 36, 131; and neo-conservatives, 139–43 anti-clericalism, 173, 193 Apocalypse (9/11 as), 4, 9, 37–8, 47, 180 Arendt, Hannah, 142, 211, 250 Aron, Raymond, 12, 137, 151–2, 165 Atlantic, 204–5 Atlantistes, 12, 14, 40, 133, 139, 152, 156–7 Atta, Mohamed, 76, 81, 84

axis of evil, 25, 44–6, 113, 180, 188, 195 Bacharan, Nicole, 150 Badiou, Alain, 6–7, 29, 54, 57, 61, 66–7 Barthes, Roland, 136, 196 Balibar, Etienne, 11–12, 104–5, 112 Baubérot, Jean, 176 Baudrillard, Jean, 54, 57–63, 75–7, 107 Beigbeder, Frédéric, 20, 52, 57, 68, 71–7, 80 Bell, Daniel, 125, 127, 139, 153 bin Laden, Osama, 34, 38, 45, 51, 56, 64, 78, 92, 96, 241 Birnbaum, Jean, 149 Blair, Tony, 126, 173 Blasphemy (right to), 16, 21, 206, 219 Blumenthal, Sidney, 152–3 Boko Haram, 218 Boltansky, Christophe, 232–4 Bolton, John, 160 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 107, 115, 118, 122

272

Boston Globe, 176 Bourdieu, Pierre, 162–4, 169–70 Brooks, David, 115, 130, 148, 159n.17 Bruckner, Pascal, 14, 24, 139–40, 146, 165–70 Buchanan, Patrick Joseph (Pat), 123, 130 Burgat, François, 234 Burke, Edmund, 13, 114–15, 117, 119, 131 Bush, George H.W., 151 Bush, George W., and 9/11, 39, 59, 63–4, 212–3; and American evangelicals, 191, 197–9; and antiFrench sentiment in the US, 13, 101, 112; and French critique of Bush administration’s foreign policy, 134–5, 166, 176; and Iraq war, 8, 11, 14, 20, 125, 130; and neoconservatives, 116, 124, 140; and religion, 173–4, 180, 183–4, 187–90 Cable News Network (CNN), 57, 90 Carter, James Earl, Jr (Jimmy), 183, 189 Catholic Church 94, 112, 174, 181–3, 194–7, 219–21 Catholic traditionalists, 8, 28, 89, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 92, 96–7 Cercle de l’Oratoire, 143, 146, 148, 255n.7 Charlie Hebdo, 201–2, 204, 206, 210, 218, 221–5, 239–43 Cheney, Richard Bruce (Dick), 90, 121, 127

Index

Chirac, Jacques, 10, 16, 19, 146, 155, 181; and ban on Muslim veils in schools, 175–7; and resistance to US intervention in Iraq, 32, 100–4, 114, 121, 131, 204–5 Chomsky, Noam, 24–5, 94 Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill), 142, 151, 169, 189 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 29–30, 208 Colombani, Jean-Marie, 6, 8, 29–37, 39, 40, 42, 150, 208 Commentary, 126, 139 Commission Stasi (report to the President of the Republic on the application of the principle of laïcité in the Republic, 2005), 176, 179 communautaristes, 8, 19, 28, 141, 167, 177, 181, 214, 219, 244–5 conspiracy theories, 20, 59, 62, 68, 71, 86–8, 92–3, 95, 241 Corcuff, Philippe, 137–9 Coulibaly, Amedy, 215, 218, 234–5, 252, 249 Courrier international, 174 Courtois, Stéphane, 144–5 Debray, Régis, 20, 191 de Gaulle, Charles, 100, 149; and French foreign policy, 156–62 Derrida, Jacques, 6–7, 23, 29, 54–7, 67, 251n.5 Desuin, Hadrien, 155–62, 164–5 Diacritik, 80 Dollé, Jean-Paul, 30, 49 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 7, 49–54 Eppik, Derk Jan, 203–4 Erdoğan, Recep Tayipp, 246

Index

273

Fabius, Laurent, 157 Fath, Sébastien, 190–91, 196–7, 200 Fauré, Christine, 137 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 90 Finkielkraut, Alain, 153–4 France Culture, 174 Francophobia, 13, 116 French evangelicals, 15, 20, 192, 196, 199–200; and Le Nouvel Observateur, 178–84 French jihadists, 18, 204, 211, 219, 227, 240 French Revolution, 9, 13, 118, 113–23, 163, 205, 220, 247 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 47, 49, 52 Front de gauche, 217 Front national, 7, 17, 215–7 Fukuyama, Francis, 123, 130, 140–2, 144, 148 Furet, François, 31, 119–20, 123, 125, 137

Guantanamo Bay detention camp, 33, 98, 225 Gulf War, 36, 71, 102, 110, 164, 168

Girard, Renaud, 157 Girard, René, 49–50, 52–3 globalistes, 8, 28, 36, 48, 154, 165–7 Gluck, Carol, 58, 70–71, 74 Glucksmann, André, 6–7, 14; and 9/11, 23, 46–9; as anti-anti-American, 132–6; and Iraq war, 140, 166–8; and Islamic veil, 177; as nouveau philosophe, 24, 137, 139 Gopnik, Adam, 146, 149, 154, 166, 254 Graham, William Franklin Jr (Billy), 25, 183, 187, 195–7 Grange, Juliette, 138 Ground Zero, 3, 9, 12, 23, 51–3, 69, 73, 99, 238

identitaires, 8, 19, 28 Il Manifesto, 24 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL, Daech, Daesch), 157–8, 201–2, 205, 210–11, 222–3, 227–8, 237, 241–2 Islamistes, 16, 18, 27, 47–8, 67, 190, 204, 212, 225–6, 230, 245 islamo-fascisme, 24, 37, 126, 144 islamo-gauchisme, 246 Islamophobia, 6, 17, 22, 165, 229–30, 237, 245, 249 Israel, 38, 149, 259

Habermas, Jürgen, 7, 24, 216 Hamilton, Alexander, 40, 117, 130, 205 Hezbollah, 89, 144 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, 3, 9, 31, 51 Hobbes, Thomas, 109–11, 172; America as Hobbesian Behemoth, 12, 106 Hofstadter, Richard, 86, 90, 185–6 Hollande, François, 14, 16, 140; and foreign policy in the Muslim World, 155–60, 162; and terrorism, 212–6, 224, 226, 244 Huntington, Samuel, 6, 51, 140 Hussein, Saddam, 10, 32, 36, 59, 85, 88, 93, 118, 122, 129

Jacobinism, 13, 114, 117–25, 130, 154

274

Je suis Charlie, 16–7, 206–7, 219–21, 224, 247 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 12, 40, 107 Kagan, Robert, 11, 41, 105–6, 108, 110–12, 123, 128–31, 206 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 30, 87, 97–8, 138, 207 Kepel, Gilles, 19, 229–35, 237 Kerry, John, 40, 141, 198–9 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 235 Kissinger, Henry, 40, 126, 130, 151, 158–9 Koop, Allen V., 193–5 Kouachi, Chérif and Saïd, 16, 215–6, 234, 242, 249 Kouchner, Bernard, 29, 36, 158–9, Kristol, Irving, 125, 127–9, 140 Kristol, William (Bill), 105, 115, 123, 125, 128, 130 Lacan, Jacques, 54, 60, 70, 136 Laclau, Ernesto, 88, 216 Lagarde, François, 22–3, 69 laïcité, 9, 89, 174, 178–9, 181, 183, 200, 214, 230, 248 Lasky, Melvin, 10, 168 le Bataclan, 17, 201, 222–3 Le Canard enchaîné, 173, 196 Le Débat, 135, 137 Le Figaro, 36, 51, 139–40, 145, 157, 160, 202 L’Humanité, 196, 224 Le Meilleur des mondes, 14, 139, 143, 146–51, 153, 166 Le Monde, 8, 24, 29-30, 85, 143, 148, 165–6, 202, 234 Le Nouvel Observateur,139, 159, 180–4

Index

Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 146, 215 Le Pen, Marine, 216–7 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 36, 139–40, 146, 149, 154, 158–9; as anti-anti American, 132–5; as nouveau philosophe, 6, 14, 136–7; and political correctness in America, 167; and US neoconservatives, 141–3 Libération, 140, 148, 196, 210, 218, 229 loi de 1905 (on the separation of Church and State), 172, 245 London train bombings (2005), 13, 31, 48, 97, 202, 224 Los Angeles Times, 205, 224 Macron, Emmanuel, 14, 160, 169, 243–9 Madrid train bombings (2004), 9–10, 30–1, 48, 97, 182, 201–2, 206, 212 Malraux, André, 15, 133, 159 Marianne, 148, 174, 248 Meyssan, Thierry, 88–94, 106–7 mondialisation, 6, 22, 32, 46, 156 Mouffe, Chantal, 216–7 multiculturalism, 154, 227, 248 Mumbai bombings (2011), 13, 16 Neff, R. Alex, 119–200 Neo-Gaullists, 14, 29, 155, 170 New York Herald Tribune, 193 New York Times, 247 Nixon, Richard Milhouse, 126, 151, 158–9 nouvelle philosophie, 136–7, 139, 152 Obama, Barack, 87, 111, 94–5, 97,

Index

138, 150, 152, 156, 164, 169, 189, 206 openDemocracy, 203, 205 Operation Enduring Freedom (2001), 8, 32 Operation Northwoods (1962), 97–8 Palestine, 9, 38, 44–5, 106, 141, 143, 162, 236 Paris-Match, 9, 202 Patriot Act, 16, 205, 219, 224 Paty, Samuel, 243–6, 248–9 Pearl Harbor (1942), 3, 9, 31, 64, 97 Pentagon (as target of 9/11 attack), 89–92, 241 Perle, Richard, 126, 141–2, 149 pro-Americanism, 10, 34, 133 Public Interest, 127, 139 Putin, Vladimir, 14 Rancière, Jacques, 29, 54, 57, 63–7 Rassemblement national, 138, 245 Robespierre, Maximilien, 13, 107–8, 114, 117, 120–3 Rougier, Bernard, 18–9, 229–32 Roy, Olivier, 7, 18–19, 42–6, 86–7, 227–30, 232–4, 236 Rumsfeld, Donald, 20, 41, 91, 102–4, 113, 127 Ryn, Claes Gösta, 113–24, 127, 128, 130–1 Salafism, 6, 18, 22, 177, 227–8, 235 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 14, 149–50, 155–9, 162, 216–7 séparatisme, 19, 153, 227, 236, 244 sharia law, 176, 178, 192 sidération, 22, 76

275

Slate Magazine, 202–3, 207, 222 Sloterdijk, Peter, 12, 104 souverainistes, 8, 14, 28–9, 166 Spanish-American War, 98, 103, 110, 163, 172 Stalinism, 35, 47, 107, 112–3, 127, 136, 168, 248 state of siege (as response to terrorism), 225 Strauss, Leo, 115, 124, 127–8, 142, 150, 154 Syria, 14, 38, 106, 162, 180, 204–5, 213, 227, 236, 244 Taillandier, Fanny, 20, 52, 68, 71, 76–85 Taubmann, Michel, 143–4, 148 Tertrais, Bruno, 148, 151 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 12, 52, 128, 137, 141, 163, 172; and the philosophical Atlantic, 106–10; and American patriotism, 186 Todd, Emmanuel, 16, 29, 133, 215, 219–21 Truc, Gérôme, 48, 209–212, 224 Trudeau, Justin, 247 Trump, Donald John, 14, 25, 111, 156, 160, 165–6, 168–9, 186 Truong, Fabien, 235–6 Truthers, 94, 96, 98 universalism, 13, 116, 127, 130, 152, 154, 167, 177, 248, 262 Valls, Manuel, 205, 214–6 Vanity Fair, 232 Védrine, Hubert, 106, 155 Villepin, Dominique Galouzeau de, 11, 102, 114, 141–2, 147

276

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, 205, 214–6 Wahhabism, 6, 22, 192 Wall Street Journal, 115, 132 War of 1812, 3, 25, 31, 103, 172 Washington Post, 248

Index

Weekly Standard, 126, 128, 139, 142 Wilson, Woodrow, 40, 123–4, 154, 159, 164–5 Woodward, Bob, 64, 101 Žižek, Slavoj, 52, 54, 60–2, 67, 70–4