Facing Terrorism in France: Lessons from the 2015 Paris Attacks (French Politics, Society and Culture) 9783030941628, 9783030941635, 3030941620

Citation preview

FRENCH POLITICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE

Facing Terrorism in France Lessons from the 2015 Paris Attacks Edited by Florence Faucher · Gérôme Truc

French Politics, Society and Culture

Series Editor Jocelyn Evans, School of Politics & International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

This series examines all aspects of French politics, society and culture. In so doing it focuses on the changing nature of the French system as well as the established patterns of political, social and cultural life. Contributors to the series are encouraged to present new and innovative arguments so that the informed reader can learn and understand more about one of the most beguiling and compelling of European countries.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14991

Florence Faucher · Gérôme Truc Editors

Facing Terrorism in France Lessons from the 2015 Paris Attacks

Editors Florence Faucher Sciences Po Centre d’´etudes europ´eennes et de politique compar´ee Paris, France

Gérôme Truc CNRS Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique Paris, France

French Politics, Society and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-94162-8 ISBN 978-3-030-94163-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5 Translation from the French language edition: Face aux attentats (Press Universitaires de France) by Andrew Brown, © Presses Universitaires de France / Humensis 2020. Published by Presses Universitaires de France. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: AG photographe/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Praise for Facing Terrorism in France

“This fine, wide-ranging collection on the 2015 Paris attacks brings together cutting-edge scholarship on social responses to modern terrorism. Ranging from memorials to media, schools to state symbols, Muslim actors to electoral politics, this rigorous collection takes stock of what we know while charting future directions of research.” —Stéphane Gerson, Professor of French, French Studies and History, New York University, USA “This volume, expertly curated and edited by Faucher and Truc, presents a multitude of scholarly perspectives to help us understand the impact of the 2015 terrorist attacks on France. By bringing together perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, and media studies, the editors produce the most complete treatment of a society’s reaction to these horrific events that I have seen. It is a must read.” —Marc J. Hetherington, Raymond Dawson Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA “France has been the target of more terrorist attacks than any other Western country. In this major contribution to the burgeoning new field of ‘terrorism studies’, these attacks – including those against Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in 2015 – are subjected to intense social scientific analysis. Deploying a range of disciplinary approaches – psychology, sociology, political-science and media studies – the authors offer a rich v

vi

PRAISE FOR FACING TERRORISM IN FRANCE

canvas of the many ways in which different individuals experienced and reacted to these attacks.” —Jolyon Howorth, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, USA, author of Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (Palgrave) “Facing Terrorism in France is a timely and important volume that sheds new light on the simultaneous terrorist attacks that convulsed Paris in 2015. Drawing on a variety of perspectives, the book presents a compelling analysis of terrorism’s impacts and the responses needed to counteract these effects.” —Bruce Hoffman, Professor of Security Studies, Georgetown University, author of Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press) “Taking a very original perspective in research on political violence, this precious collection investigates the learning and healing processes that followed the Charlie Hebdo’s attacks. With contributions from various disciplines and triangulating empirical methods, the analysis goes beyond the shock of the events, addressing the individual and collective processes that developed after the terrorist attacks, immediately but also in a long term perspective, on the spot but also at a distance, in the private but also in the public spheres.” —Donatella della Porta, Professor of Political Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. Director of Centre of Social Movements Studies, author of Clandestine Political Violence (Cambridge University Press) and Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures: Debating Citizenship after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks (Oxford University Press) “A must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of personal and collective responses to terrorism in France. Especially fascinating and relevant for French studies, this volume highlights diverse social perspectives with deftness and lucidity.” —Nathalie Debrauwere-Miller, Associate Professor of French and Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University, USA

Contents

1

1

Introduction Florence Faucher and Gérôme Truc

2

At the Centre of the Attack: From Individual Fear to Mutual Assistance Guillaume Dezecache

13

Out in the Street: Ephemeral Memorials to Express Mourning Maëlle Bazin

23

On Television: Journalists Caught Between Rival Demands Pierre Lefébure and Claire Sécail

33

On the Internet: From Conflicting Values to Counter-Publics Romain Badouard

45

In the Schools: Bringing Pupils into the National Community of Mourning Sébastien Ledoux

55

3

4

5

6

7

French Muslims: A Silent Community? Vincent Geisser

69

vii

viii

CONTENTS

8

At the Upper Echelons of the State: Symbols to Build National Unity Laurie Boussaguet and Florence Faucher

81

In People’s Minds: An Authoritarian Dynamic or the Spread of Tolerance? Vincent Tiberj

93

9

10

Social Sciences in a Time of Terror Gérôme Truc

107

References

121

Index

127

List of Contributors

Romain Badouard Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Médias, Paris, France Maëlle Bazin Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Médias, Paris, France Laurie Boussaguet European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy Guillaume Dezecache Université Clermont Auvergne, Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, Clermont-Ferrand, France Florence Faucher Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée, Paris, France; Nuffield College, Oxford, United Kingdom Vincent Geisser CNRS, Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans, Aix-en-Provence, France Sébastien Ledoux Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, Paris, France Pierre Lefébure Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Claire Sécail CNRS, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

ix

x

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Vincent Tiberj Sciences Bordeaux, France

Po

Bordeaux,

Centre

Émile

Durkheim,

Gérôme Truc CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Paris, France

List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

Longitudinal index of tolerance (1990–November 2018) The longitudinal index of tolerance across birth cohorts The longitudinal index of tolerance across ideological self-placement

98 99 100

xi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Florence Faucher and Gérôme Truc

Abstract In 2015, two series of deadly attacks in Paris and its area, the first in January including the Charlie Hebdo attack and the second on 13 November, shocked France. A flurry of reactions followed including an unprecedented surge of scientific research. This introductory chapter sets out the contribution of a book that brings together a diversity of social scientific approaches—from psychology, sociology, political science and media studies. Its overall aim is to shed light on the individual and collective responses to terror attacks, immediately and with the passing of time, on the spot or at a distance, in person or through the media. We conclude with an overview of each chapter highlighting its contribution to our understanding of the response of French society to the attacks.

F. Faucher (B) Sciences Po, Centre d’´etudes europ´eennes et de politique compar´ee, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] G. Truc CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_1

1

2

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

Keywords Terrorist attacks · Social sciences · French society · Resilience · Charlie Hebdo · Bataclan · Responses · Research

On Wednesday 7 January, 12 people were shot dead by two attackers during the editorial board meeting of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical leftleaning weekly magazine. The same number were injured. The gunmen fled and identified themselves as belonging to Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen. Several related attacks followed in Paris and its region, including the murder of a city police officer at a crossroads and of four Jewish customers taken hostage along with 15 others in a kosher supermarket. The three men involved in the attacks were killed in simultaneous assaults by the police on Friday 9 January in the afternoon. For three days, intense live media coverage allowed the French publics to witness the manhunt across the region and the siege of the supermarket. Within hours of the initial attack, Je suis Charlie became a meme on social media, whilst political parties and civil society organisations called for vigils and marches. At the weekend, nearly 4 million people joined marches and vigils across France; President Hollande hosted an impromptu international summit and marched with several dozens of heads of state and heads of governments, as well as representatives from all sections of French society, from journalists to politicians, religious leaders, civic associations and union representatives, and millions of anonymous citizens. The following week’s issue of Charlie Hebdo was printed in six languages and sold nearly 8 million copies worldwide. Just 10 months later, Paris and its region were again the target of terrorists. On 13 November 2015, a second series of coordinated attacks hit the Bataclan Theatre, the Stade de France and several restaurants and café terraces in the 10th and 11th districts of Paris. 130 people were killed and more than 400 injured in what was the worst terrorist attack in France since World War II. It is an understatement to say that these events of January and November 2015 shocked France—and the world. They initiated a flurry of publications and communications, an outpouring of emotions and opinions in the media as well as on social media. They triggered intense debates about how to interpret what had happened and how to respond to it, how to heal the wounds and the social divisions and how to prevent repetitions (see, for instance, Iacobucci and Toope 2015; Titley et al.

1

INTRODUCTION

3

2017; Della Porta et al. 2020). However, these events were not unprecedented, nor were they unique. Since the 1980s, France had already faced several waves of attacks perpetrated by different Islamic groups. In 1986, the Comité de solidarité avec les prisonniers politiques arabes et du ProcheOrient killed 7 people and injured over 50 in the rue de Rennes in Paris. In the 1990s, several attacks were orchestrated by the Algerian Groupe islamique armé, including one in the Saint-Michel-Notre Dame RER station that killed 8 and injured over a hundred. More recently, in 2012, an isolated gunman killed 7, including 3 children, in several attacks in Toulouse and Montauban, during the presidential election campaign. Terrorism—using violence and fear as instruments of coercion to achieve political goals, whether inspired by religious beliefs or not—is not a new phenomenon. It strikes globally every year and kills hundreds, mostly outside the Global North (Raflik 2016; Hoffman 2017). The relative restraint exhibited historically by some groups in terms of the number of victims is not shown by others such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Thousands were killed in New York and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001, hundreds in Madrid in 2004 and dozens in London in 2005, to name but a few major Western cities hit since the beginning of the twentyfirst century. After this ‘Al Qaeda decade’ came the ‘ISIS decade’, with the Paris attacks, and then several others, including a brutal attack on the crowds gathered in Nice to celebrate 14 July: this killed 85 people, including many children, and injured more than 400. In the two years that followed the attack on Charlie Hebdo, young individuals claiming an association with ISIS killed large numbers of people in European countries (in Brussels, Barcelona, London, Manchester, etc.) as well as North America (with the Orlando nightclub shooting in particular)‚ Africa and Asia. They used a diversity of techniques (bombs, assault weapons, knives, vehicles) and selected their targets because of who they were (their occupation, their ethnic or religious background) or because of where they were at the time (concert halls, stadium, bars and restaurants, public celebration of a national holiday, churches or places of political power, places of transit).

Social Sciences and the Effects of Terrorism Since 11 September 2001, the development of research on similar attacks has led to the emergence of a new discipline of terrorism studies (Stampnitzky 2013; Chenoweth et al. 2019; Silke 2019). The terrorist

4

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

phenomenon and its social and political effects are much better known than thirty years ago. One of the objectives of such attacks is to undermine social trust and to challenge the taken-for-granted modus vivendi through fear, suspicion and the de-legitimation of political and social authorities. The abrupt irruption of violence and the killing of civilians underline the inability of the state to perform its role and its duties of protection and of prevention of violence. Like other focusing events, an attack can be taken as the manifestation of the fact that the state has temporarily lost control. It thus has the potential for challenging the legitimacy of those in power. Whether or not it is labelled as a ‘crisis’, such an event triggers several reactions in the populations affected (Post, 2005; Spilerman and Stecklov 2009; Truc 2017), including the search for meaning and the stirring up of conflicts between competing interpretations of causes and remedies, or the amplification of collective stress, insecurity and feelings of vulnerability. It opens up a ‘social drama’ (Turner 1969; Wagner-Pacifici 1986), a process of resolution of the conflicts and disruptions created or manifested by the breach in the status quo. Much attention is directed towards the political leadership that is expected to guide the social body through the process and produce or facilitate the emergence of solutions (usually predominantly in the form of public policies) (Closs Stephens and Vaughan-Williams 2009; Ansell et al. 2014; Boin et al. 2017). The responses of a polity under attack are linked to the interpretative frames that come to dominate. These frames are articulated in the news media (Lakoff, 2004; Norris et al. 2003) and by opinion leaders (Baum and Potter 2008) as well as in the discourses produced by the political leadership to explain, unite and console victims and society (Hart, 1993; Simko 2015; Boussaguet and Faucher 2018). Other authors have sought to extend the notion of a ‘rally around the flag’ and of a ‘patriotic reflex’ that would lead populations to support the incumbent executive in the case of international events involving the US (Mueller 1985; Baker and Oneal 2001; Hetherington and Nelson 2003) along with repressive and illiberal policies destined to punish the enemy or prevent repetition (Stenner 2005). The January and November 2015 attacks have given rise to an unprecedented surge of scientific research on these issues in France. This surge was commensurate with the massive reaction triggered by these events in French society: the mobilisation of citizens for demonstrations and vigils and the spread of large numbers of street memorials across the country; the intensity of social media interactions and the transformation

1

INTRODUCTION

5

of TV schedules, with record audiences for live news reports, addresses to the nation by political leaders and even televised homage ceremonies; a publishing profusion of testimonies, reports, enquiries, psychology and self-help books, essays and opinions which also translated into graphic novels, documentaries and films; and the transformation of public space with the deployment of the military in the streets and the introduction of a ‘state of emergency’ that lasted 23 months—the longest since the adoption of the law in 1955. It is therefore no surprise that social scientists directed their enquiries first and foremost to these two attacks, even though several others also shocked the public, such as the murders of two police officers in their home, at Magnanville in June 2016, of a priest during mass at Saint-Etienne-du Rouvray in July 2016 and of two young women at a train station in Marseille in October 2017. Moreover, in a highly unusual move, the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) released a specific call for projects with a direct connection to the 13 November attacks. This resulted in the funding of more than sixty research projects with a great diversity of angles of analysis, disciplinary approaches and methodologies.1 This book draws on several of these research projects, as well as others that were affected by the 2015 attacks. It aims to show how academic research produces important and useful knowledge that can help a society to make sense of what is happening to its members in times of crisis. Such knowledge can also contribute to a healing process required in such circumstances: indeed, individuals and collectives need to engage with difficult emotions so that they can respond to the challenges with resilience and reflexivity. As a result, we hope that it can be read as a contribution to the learning and healing processes that take place in a given society, here French society, beyond the shock and horror of the events themselves. From a scientific point of view, its originality lies in the diversity of approaches brought together—psychology, sociology, political science, media studies—in order to shed light on the individual and collective processes of response to terror attacks, on the spur of the moment or over time, on the spot or at a distance, in person or through the media. The chapters are organised according to a gradual logic that takes the reader to different levels, or different spheres, of society. Each of them offers an original and self-contained analysis from a specific, socially

1 https://www.cnrs.fr/en/facing-terrorism-year-mobilization-cnrs.

6

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

located, viewpoint. Together they create a rich tapestry that helps the reader understand the reactions to the 2015 events from the perspective of individuals, social groups and institutions, and the interdependence and interactions between them. As such, they contribute to a unique understanding of how French society responded to the attacks. At the same time, they invite us to re-examine the reactions to previous attacks and to undertake international comparative studies so as to refine our knowledge (Truc 2019).

Structure of the Book In the first chapter, Guillaume Dezecache draws on interviews with survivors of the attack on the Bataclan to explore whether, in the face of great and imminent danger, individuals behave as ‘every man for himself’ in the way ‘common sense’ (and rational choice premises) would have it. Through interviews, he carefully reconstructs with survivors both their recollection of the event and their perceptions of the attitudes of others in a moment of need. This allows him to map the strategies instinctively adopted to save oneself and support others and to show how panic and fear also lead to altruistic behaviours, to cooperation and solidarity. Chapter 2 then moves from the heart of the attack to dwell, with Maëlle Bazin, on the many spontaneous memorials that appeared after the attacks of January and November 2015 on the Place de la République and in the streets of Paris that had been hit by terrorists. As in Madrid and London before (Sánchez-Carretero 2006; Sánchez-Carretero et al. 2011; Truc 2017), and in other various cities targeted by terrorists since, such as Brussels, Barcelona or Manchester (Miloševi´c 2018; Arvanitis 2019),2 the contents of these memorials have been carefully collected and archived as precious traces of how the society grieved in response to the attacks. Maëlle Bazin places these testimonies of solidarity and compassion in the context of their growing popularity in recent years in Western societies (Santino 2006; Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011). Her analysis underlines the role of media representations as a factor contributing to the

2 For more information of these different cases as well as the French one, see online the website of the Network of Archives of Spontaneous Memorials: http://www.sponta neousmemorials.org/resources/.

1

INTRODUCTION

7

naturalisation and internationalisation of this ritual as a healing, expressive and social practice that helps individuals and groups move on after dramatic events such as terrorist attacks. The media comprise the third level of analysis. In 2015, French media were brutally confronted with decisions about what could be shown or emphasised in the coverage of a terrorist attack, from images of corpses and the faces of terrorists to the emotions of survivors and emergency services confronted with the carnage in the streets of Paris. Could journalists unwittingly contribute to amplifying the traumatic impact of terror attacks? Their dilemmas involved resisting the terrorists’ agenda and the temptation to provide unique pictures and contents. In Chap. 3, Pierre Lefébure and Claire Sécail return to the debates generated by the TV broadcast of the attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016), by confronting them with historical and international practices in comparable contexts. They show that the broadcast media are at the centre of recurring and heated public debates about the role of images and the responsibility of television journalists, and they highlight the endogenous and exogenous factors contributing to their evolution. Chapter 4 illustrates how the Internet and social media played a crucial role in rapidly spreading information about the attacks and reactions and emotional responses to them. The central contribution of this study is the way it sheds light on the transformation of the public space for debates. Romain Badouard analyses the record peaks of online activities and discussions after the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks, both on websites and on social media. He demonstrates how the existence of the latter facilitated the expression of collective emotion, which, in turn, increased their potential to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. He points to the emergence at the time of ‘counter-publics’, that is to say of virtual communities characterised by low levels of exposure to traditional (broadcast and press) media outlets, and their growing capacity to make their voices heard more widely. The following two chapters consider how institutions and social groups reacted and contributed to the healing process. First, Sébastien Ledoux analyses how French schools responded to the emotions of pupils, teachers and carers in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 terrorist attacks. He conducted a series of interviews in several schools and with officials at the Ministry of Education, focusing in particular on the minutes of silence held after the attacks. He highlights the gap between

8

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

the official policy developed to support individuals and foster their identification and feelings of solidarity with the national community, and the reality on the ground. In Chap. 6, Vincent Geisser explores how Muslim community leaders responded to the attacks. He highlights the contradictory injunctions directed to them: to take positions and to articulate an official French Muslims’ response. Against the received idea of a so-called Muslim silence in face of the attacks, he shows how these opinion leaders, and many anonymous individuals and families, chose to combine the rituals of the Republic and those of their religion to mark their homage to the victims and develop a unique version of Islamo-patriotism. The diversity of social responses to the attacks, from those most directly affected to those who experienced them through the media and reacted to them in the street or on the Internet, finally raises the question of the political repercussions of these events and their ‘management’ by the public authorities. In Chap. 7, Laurie Boussaguet and Florence Faucher scrutinise how the government articulates a frame for the interpretation of the collective trauma and offers a narrative of resilience. They show that the French executive worked consciously after the attacks to build and preserve a national unity that it feared would break up. They argue that the phenomenon of a ‘rally around the flag’ (the government enjoyed renewed support, evident in public opinion and in the attitudes of political actors) was not a ‘patriotic reflex’ but was politically and socially constructed by the President, the Prime Minister, the Interior Minister and their teams. Based on interviews with the actors involved, they demonstrate that symbolic public action was prepared carefully and consciously and intended to prevent potential outbursts of violence. Indeed, one could think that Islamic terrorism contributes to increased support for the extreme right and that it may feed xenophobic and authoritarians sentiments in the population. But in Chap. 8, Vincent Tiberj presents a decidedly more complex picture. Survey data have been collected over several years to assess attitudes to minorities in French society and have shown a steady growth of indicators of tolerance. Contrary to expectations, the period 2015–2016 is no different. The chapter is an important contribution to the debate about the effects of terrorism on people’s authoritarian or liberal attitudes. The literature has argued that terrorist attacks can be expected to play into the hands of the extreme right by inducing fear and therefore accentuating xenophobic and authoritarian tendencies among the population. Informed by panel data on public opinion attitudes, the analysis shows that the

1

INTRODUCTION

9

evolution of levels of tolerance towards minorities (including Muslims) appears to be linked, over the past two decades, to changes in official public discourse on migration and on the integration of religious minorities. Indeed, argues Tiberj, one explanation for the evolution in public attitudes lies in the performative dimension of political discourse. The careful framing of terrorists as Islamists rather than Muslims after January may well have contributed to the counter-intuitive increase of tolerance to minorities in the aftermath of the attacks. Finally, Gérôme Truc looks back in the last chapter to the criticisms addressed to the social sciences following the Paris attacks. Indeed, it is interesting to note that, at the same time as these attacks gave rise to an explosion of scientific research, they also fuelled the suspicion of social and political actors that the social sciences provide ‘excuses’ for terrorists when they try to explain what has happened and its effects. In response, Gérôme Truc shows how the social sciences are precisely what we need in order to understand what these suspicions and criticisms reveal about these critical times. Indeed, he argues that the period that follows an attack can be considered as what Randall Collins calls a ‘hysteria zone’ characterised by social effervescence (Collins 2004). This includes ritualistic displays of solidarity, but also overreactions, moral panics, and heightened sensitivities and tensions within society. By raising our awareness about such phenomena, social scientific knowledge may limit the risk of falling into the very trap set by terrorists: that of engaging in false debates that weaken social cohesion. Together, these nine contributions provide a detailed and diverse picture of how French society responded when faced with terrorist attacks, and demonstrate how the social sciences can help us in such circumstances. They bring the rigour and diverse analytic lenses of various disciplines to shed light on the complex processes through which a social group recovers from traumatic events. They point to the role that the symbolic plays in sustaining social relationships and maintaining the resilience of the national community (Boussaguet and Faucher 2020), from the individuals confronted with grave and imminent danger in the Bataclan to those who mourned the victims in the streets or sought to affirm their attachment to the nation, with all its ethno-religious diversity. One should not neglect the role institutions play in the process: they articulate a discourse of unity and belonging, and propose ritual performances that allow individuals to experience this whilst maintaining a diverse and conflictual democratic public sphere for debates about ‘le vivre ensemble’.

10

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

References Ansell, C., A. Boin, and P. Hart. 2014. Political Leadership in Times of Crisis. In The Oxford handbook of political leadership, ed. R.A.W. Rhodes and P. Hart, 418–433. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arvanitis, K. 2019. The ‘Manchester Together Archive’: Researching and Developing a Museum Practice of Spontaneous Memorials, Museum and Society 17(3): 510–532. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v17i3.3203. Baker, W.D., and J.R. Oneal. 2001. Patriotism or Opinion Leadership? The Nature and Origins of the “Rally Round the Flag” Effect. The Journal of Conflict Resolution 45 (5): 661–687. Baum, M.A., and P.B.K. Potter. 2008. The Relationships Between Mass Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis. Annual Review of Political Science 11 (1): 39–65. Boin, A., P. Hart, P.C. Stern, and B. Sundelius. 2017. The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boussaguet, L., and F. Faucher. 2018. La Construction des discours présidentiels post-attentats à l’épreuve du temps. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118: 95–115. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23867. _________. 2020. Beyond a ‘Gesture’: The Treatment of the Symbolic in Public Policy Analysis. French Politics 18 (1–2): 189–205. https://doi.org/ 10.1057/s41253-020-00107-9. Chenoweth, E., R. English, A. Gofas, and S.N. Kalyvas, eds. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Closs Stephens, A., and N. Vaughan-Williams. eds. 2009. Terrorism and the Politics of Response. New York and London: Routledge. Collins, R. 2004. Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist Attack. Sociological Theory 22 (1): 53–87. Della Porta, D., P. C. Gattinara, K. Eleftheriadis, and A. Felicetti. eds. 2020. Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures: Debating Citizenship after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Hart, P. 1993. Symbols, Rituals and Power: The Lost Dimensions of Crisis Management. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management 1 (1): 36–50. Hetherington, M. J., and M. Nelson. 2003. Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism, Political Science & Politics 36(1): 37–42. Hoffman, B. 2017. Inside Terrorism, 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Iacobucci, E.M., and S.J. Toope, eds. 2015. After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and Around the Globe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

1

INTRODUCTION

11

Lakoff, G. 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate—The Essential Guide for Progressives. White River Junction: Chelsea Green. Margry, P. J., and C. Sánchez-Carretero. eds. 2011. Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York: Berghahn. Miloševi´c, A. 2018. Historicizing the Present: Brussels Attacks and Heritagization of Spontaneous Memorials. International Journal of Heritage Studies 24 (1): 53–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1362574. Mueller, J.E. 1985. War, Presidents and Public Opinion. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Norris, P., M. Kern, and M.R. Just, eds. 2003. Framing Terrorism: Understanding Terrorist Threats and Mass Media. London and New York: Routledge. Post, J.M. 2005. When Hatred is Bred in the Bone: Psycho-Cultural Foundations of Contemporary Terrorism. Political Psychology 26 (4): 615–636. Raflik, J. 2016. Terrorisme et mondialisation: approches historiques. Paris: Gallimard. Sánchez-Carretero, C. 2006. Trains of Workers, Trains of Death: Some Reflections After the March 11 Attacks in Madrid. In Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. J. Santino, 333–347. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave. ________, A. Cea, P. Díaz-Mas, P. Martínez, and C. Ortiz. 2011. On Blurred Borders and Interdisciplinary Research Teams: The Case of the ‘Archive of Mourning’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12(3). https://doi.org/10. 17169/fqs-12.3.1737. Santino, J. ed. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave. Silke, A. 2019. Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism. London and New York: Routledge. Simko, C. 2015. The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spilerman, S., and G. Stecklov. 2009. Societal Responses to Terrorist Attacks. Annual Review of Sociology 35: 167–189. Stampnitzky, L. 2013. Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stenner, K. 2005. The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Titley, G., D. Freedman, G. Khiabany, and A. Mondon, eds. 2017. After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech. London: Zed Books. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks. Cambridge: Polity Press.

12

F. FAUCHER AND G. TRUC

_____. 2019. What Terror Attacks do to Societies: Fieldwork and Case Studies. Ethnologie Française 173: 5–19. https://doi.org/10.3917/ethn.191.0005. Turner, V. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine. Wagner-Pacifici, R. 1986. The Moro Morality Play. Terrorism as Social Drama. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 2

At the Centre of the Attack: From Individual Fear to Mutual Assistance Guillaume Dezecache

Abstract How do humans behave when exposed to deadly dangers? It is commonly believed that panic and antisocial behaviour are commonplace, but extensive research on this topic has shown this to be wrong. Rather, help and mutual support prevail. In this chapter, Guillaume Dezecache discusses the ongoing debates and provides an overview of his research with survivors of the Bataclan attack on 13 November 2015. He argues that pro-sociality (an orientation towards others) is a core motivation even in the face of deadly danger, and clarifies the conditions in which it is manifested. Keywords Panic · Fear · Collective threat · Bataclan attack · Terrorism · Pro-sociality · Mutual support

G. Dezecache (B) Université Clermont Auvergne, Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive, Clermont-Ferrand, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_2

13

14

G. DEZECACHE

It’s 9 pm on Friday, 13 November 2015. The Bataclan, the legendary Parisian concert hall in the 11th arrondissement, is fully packed. The Eagles of Death Metal, an American rock group known for their energy, but also for their pranks, are playing. The crowd is dense (there are around 1,500 spectators divided between the pit, the bar and the balconies) and the atmosphere is extraordinary. This is what many of the 32 people that my colleagues and I interviewed between June 2016 and November 2016 reported to us. We met them in the context of a study, funded by the CNRS, seeking better to understand how groups react to immediate danger in the context of a mass shooting (Dezecache et al. 2021). The people we met could not imagine that, at 9.40 p.m., as the band launched into their flagship song Kiss The Devil, three men would rush into the Bataclan, heavily armed and determined to kill (Fenech and Pietrasanta 2016). Most of the audience thought the first shots were the noise of firecrackers being let off: ‘The shots from a Kalashnikov, it really sounds like firecrackers you know… It sounds like the firecrackers we played with when we were kids’. Some thought this was a new prank on the part of the group, or maybe a ‘happening’ put on by activists critical of Jesse Hugues, the frontman of the Eagles of Death Metal, a supporter for the National Rifle Association. When the shooting resumed and the members of the group began to flee, some of the spectators realised they needed to act urgently: ‘It was really the smell of gunpowder and the screams that made us think that something was going on. It was my brother who dragged me to the ground’. Others said they never really realised they were being targeted by a terrorist attack. Who would bear a grudge against the audience of a mere rock and roll band? The 32 people we interviewed were able to leave the hall alive, sometimes with serious injuries (9 of them were hit by one or more bullets). Some escaped at the very start of the attack and others after the death of one of the attackers—the last, after the intervention of the special forces. In all, 90 people lost their lives, and hundreds were injured. We decided to interview these survivors of the Bataclan attack to understand better, through their testimony, how people behave when faced with mass shooters in the presence of other people.

2

AT THE CENTRE OF THE ATTACK: FROM INDIVIDUAL FEAR …

15

‘Run for Your Life’ and ‘Everyone for Themselves’: The Myth of Crowd Panic Since the work of Gustave Le Bon, it is taken as common wisdom that the exposure of a crowd to danger causes panic and the decay of social bonds among its members (Dezecache 2015). Cinema provides so many examples that one may be tempted to skip browsing academic tomes: who can’t recall a movie scene in which the hero has to fight his way through a panic-stricken crowd (Quarantelli 1975)? One of the most famous scenes of this kind is the ‘Odessa Steps’ in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, in which a crowd of demonstrators rushes down the steps when the Tsar’s soldiers start to suppress the protest. In such circumstances, it is expected that people push and trample their way through, because their very survival is at stake. In fact, for the observer and the naive psychologist, two rules of individual behaviour are thought to prevail: ‘run for your life’ and ‘everyone for themselves’. This is also what emerges from many journalists’ accounts of recent attacks. In the articles we collected, the lexical fields of ‘panic’, ‘chaos’, ‘disorder’ and ‘mayhem’ occur regularly. A spectator who survived the suicide bomber attack in the Manchester Arena in England on 22 May 2017 recounts, for example, how people scrambled down the steps after the bomb exploded, with everyone trying to get out as quickly as possible. A person in a wheelchair was knocked over. A bottleneck and a huge crush awaited those who somehow managed to get close to the exits.1 The two behavioural strategies which are supposed to be adopted by people exposed to deadly danger (‘run for your life’ and ‘everyone for themselves’) may seem reasonable. If queuing to evacuate calmly sounds rational for it would allow each of the individuals to get out in turn, time is running out and it is difficult to establish trust among crowd members. These conditions raise questions about who will enforce the rule and who will accept being last in the queue. Indeed, one can imagine that if one waits for too long, death is certain. Then, running towards the exit promises a chance of survival, and in such circumstances, other people are seen as mere obstacles, obstacles one may well try to elbow out of one’s way. 1 Rory, S., and C. Sewell. 2017. Ariana Grande Manchester Concert Ends in Explosion, Panic and Death. The New York Times, 22 May 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/ 05/22/world/europe/ariana-grande-manchester-police.html. Accessed October 2021.

16

G. DEZECACHE

However, panic is just one of the many ways a crowd responds to an immediate threat. More recent academic research has shown that dangerous situations do not generally give rise to panic, even when they are clearly perceived as potentially fatal. ‘Everyone for themselves’ type of behaviour does not always prevail (Dezecache 2015). Of course, extreme fear (which often, and paradoxically, is expressed by great emotional coldness and heightened sensory capacities) grips people exposed to mortal danger (Sapolsky 2004). Presence in a crowd of endangered individuals can indeed be fatal since trampling can indeed cause death, but there is no need for ‘psychology’ here. The laws of physics suffice to explain a ‘domino effect’ whereby one person tripping can cause many others to fall over her and all can potentially be trampled on one after the other (Helbing and Mukerji 2012). Why do so many people believe that panic is the prevalent mode of reaction to a frightful event? The term is ambiguous and its over use is often derived from preconceptions and anecdotes, in lieu of systematic reviews of the accounts given by survivors of disasters themselves (Quarantelli 1954). If we listen to the stories told by survivors themselves, we hear that exposure to danger leads to mutual assistance, more often than not. For instance, Rita F. Fahy and Guylène Proulx collected and analysed the testimonies of survivors of the World Trade Center attacks on 11 September 2001 that had been reported in the media (Fahy and Proulx 2005). Their research highlights how the survivors of the first tower both talk about the difficult evacuation conditions (many of the testimonies mention the inconvenience caused by debris and smoke, and the congestion due to the presence of the other victims) and describe the other victims as ‘calm’ and ‘orderly’. Almost a fifth of those interviewed by the media also mentioned that the other victims were ‘helpful’—a finding apparently more common in the first tower. These testimonies are consistent with the well-known photographs taken by John Labriola during the evacuation of the towers. The pictures show people coming down the stairs, looking calm and disciplined. There are other similar accounts, including Bruno Dellinger’s, who then worked on the 47th floor of the first tower (Dellinger 2002). In an online chat for the fifth anniversary of 9/11, he recalled that, although he understood that a plane had struck the tower, he did not feel any danger and

2

AT THE CENTRE OF THE ATTACK: FROM INDIVIDUAL FEAR …

17

remained relatively calm.2 So did others around him. Perhaps such a state of mind is linked to the impossibility of imagining the scope of what is happening. Be that as it may, Bruno Dellinger also reports that one of his first reactions, as a senior executive, was to reassure his employees, as if playing his professional role until the end. In his book World Trade Center, 47e étage (World Trade Center, 47th floor), he also recounts how the crowd descending the stairs in fits and starts just talked about ‘this and that’, ‘current projects and sports results’ (Dellinger 2002). 9/11 is not a special case. Other studies suggest the high frequency of reactions of mutual assistance during terrorist attacks. For example, John Drury and his colleagues investigated the attacks of 7 July 2005, which hit London public transport (Drury 2009b). The researchers compiled interviews with survivors and first-hand witnesses of the blasts that were published in newspapers and on the Internet. They also interviewed survivors. They then searched these testimonies for mentions of selfish or individualistic behaviour. The results of their study show that the behaviour of people at the scene of the explosions was overwhelmingly perceived as ‘calm’ and ‘orderly’, especially when witnesses were very close to the blasts. Numerous testimonies speak of the help the victims give to each other, reassuring each other, pulling survivors out of the rubble, supporting each other to facilitate evacuation, bringing water, etc. Selfish behaviour, on the other hand, seemed rare and of limited scope. Such accounts depart from what ‘common sense’ crowd psychology claims is the norm.

Responding Together to Immediate Danger in the Context of a Mass Shooting: Our Study with Survivors of the Bataclan Massacre Because recent work has highlighted that prosocial responses are in fact commonplace in emergency circumstances (including life-threatening ones), this raises a new question: is mutual assistance a ‘default’ response in life and death situations? Depending on the type of danger, reactions can be very different. An armed attack, like that of the Bataclan

2 Chat 11/09 avec Bruno Dellinger, survivant Français. 20 Minutes. 7 September 2006: https://www.20minutes.fr/vousinterviewez/107177-20060907-vous-interviewezchat-11-09-avec-bruno-dellinger-survivant-francais. Accessed October 2021.

18

G. DEZECACHE

on 13 November 2015 in Paris, presents specific situational characteristics. First, the event is sudden, compared to a blaze, which can be seen to spread gradually: opening fire with weapons puts everyone (or almost everyone) in immediate danger. Second, there are few opportunities to prepare for such an event, in contrast to the fire drills regularly performed. Until recently, there existed no comparable security procedure for an armed group’s intrusion into a performance hall. Third, the danger is extremely dynamic and its intensity depends on the mobility of the attackers. Fourth, the threat is ‘human’, which means that one can hope to reason with the attacker(s), or that they may eventually show compassion. Finally, the venue where the attack takes place is enclosed, which may restrict the success of evacuation strategies, once possible exit routes have been identified and blocked by the terrorists. Therefore, survival implies that individuals find a place to hide and shelter, sometimes after negotiations with those already occupying the space, always according to the setting they all find themselves in. Because there is very little research in social psychology that has looked at mass shootings (Jones et al. 2017; Wayment and Silver 2021), our research on the Bataclan case makes an important contribution to the study of individual and collective reactions to terrorist attacks. Between June 2016 and November 2016, we asked the survivors of this attack to tell us about ‘their’ experience of the fateful night at the Bataclan: where they were in the concert hall, who they were with, what linked them to other members of the audience and what they had done and observed. In order to better understand the nature of the immediate reactions to mass shootings, we carefully structured our questionnaire. In the first part, we asked interviewees to recall the moment when they became conscious of or perceived a danger, which nature was still unknown, and to tell the story of what happened to them on until the moment when they found a way to ‘get out of it’. In some cases, the narrative included the (possible) identification of the danger as a terrorist attack. Second, we asked participants to locate themselves, their friends and the terrorists they had identified on a diagram of the Bataclan concert hall. This allowed us to learn more about how the spatial and temporal configuration of the event may have affected their survival strategies. What did we find? First, the social actions (which we defined as a behaviour that has an effect on another person) that were reported were sometimes of mutual assistance, sometimes not. Non-supportive actions could, for example, involve the use of physical force. We were told of

2

AT THE CENTRE OF THE ATTACK: FROM INDIVIDUAL FEAR …

19

people being trampled: ‘People were walking on us’. We were also told of orders being issued to others, including demands that they stopped talking, crying, or complaining about their injuries, not to be located by the terrorists: ‘Shut up, shut up, so they’ll leave! […] Hush! Be quiet! Be quiet!’ Non-support could also take the form of negligence. One respondent recalled that he chose to ignore the situation of a woman who fell near him after being shot, instead of trying to rescue her. Another example of non-support involved people refusing to accept newcomers to a shelter such as a theatre loge. Most of the people we interviewed said they had been engaged in, or had observed, at least one such action. All interviewees reported that they had observed, initiated, or participated in actions of mutual assistance. Such assistance may have consisted of emotional support (e.g. people holding hands for comfort when they were trapped by the firing and stuck in the pit), informational support (warning that the terrorists were reloading their weapons, which gave a few seconds of respite and the possibility of running away) or physical support (people making tourniquets with their own clothes to compress wounds, participating in the leg-up to climb onto the Bataclan roof, seeking to hinder the progress of the terrorists by blocking the door with one’s own body). Perhaps more surprisingly, in some cases, these acts of mutual assistance followed ad hoc social norms. Those hiding in a loge chose to vote on whether to open the window or the door, and abided by the collective decision. In other parts of the concert hall, people who had been injured were granted priority access to shelters and everyone tried to enforce the informal rule. Overall, our study shows that, on that evening in the Bataclan, and as seen in other types of extreme circumstances, mutual assistance and cooperation were much more frequent than non-supportive behaviour. One quote from one our participants says it all: ‘We were a team’. We have shown that the mutual assistance and cooperation provided during the Bataclan attack echo the actions reported in other attack situations (at the World Trade Center, in the London Underground, etc.). Our study goes further and explores the motives that could underlie it. We wanted to distinguish whether such actions could be self-centred or altruistic. After all, one may sometimes want to help or comfort someone because one anticipates some personal benefit from it: for instance, one could comfort someone to keep them quiet and thus avoid attracting the attention of the terrorists to that part of the room. Indeed, the acts of mutual assistance reported to us were not all presented as expressing

20

G. DEZECACHE

genuine concern for others. We have therefore classified forms of mutual assistance according to what seemed to motivate them: the motivations could thus be individualistic (the author of an action seeks only to obtain his or her own well-being), cooperative (the author of the action seeks the immediate well-being of others and of himself or herself) or altruistic (only the immediate well-being of others matters). In the testimonies we collected, most forms of mutual assistance actions appear to have been supported by cooperative and altruistic motives. For instance, a young woman sought, at the risk of her own life, to help a person she had never met before to get out of the Bataclan, rather than fleeing on her own.

The Crowd in an Attack: ‘All for One, and One for All’? For what reasons do people in danger of death, and who know the risks of doing so, choose strategies other than ‘everyone for themselves’? Why do they engage in behaviours of mutual assistance? Several explanations can be found in the scholarly literature. One of them emphasises how everyday standards are maintained in dangerous situations (Johnson 1987). Another argues that what predominates in a dangerous situation is actually the fear of being separated from others (Mawson 2005; 2017). One final line of research focuses on the fundamental psychological tendency to categorize the social world. It argues that, even in such circumstances, individuals make sense of the social world by classifying the others as belonging, or not, to the same social group as oneself. The people who accompany us when we are confronted with an attack, or any other situation putting our life in danger, are categorised as being part of one and the same group as us (‘fellow sufferers’, as it were). Of course, we owe them respect and mutual assistance. And we expect the same things from them, too (Drury 2018; Drury et al. 2009a; Drury et al. 2016; Bartolucci et al. 2021). If the approach focusing on social identification appears to explain a large number of acts of mutual assistance reported by Bataclan survivors’, other factors are also significant, such as the distance from the danger and the possibility of fleeing. We know, for example, that one is less likely to observe reactions of mutual assistance when evacuation is possible than when it is not. In addition, mutual assistance appears to be more common when the individuals concerned are not most directly and immediately confronted with danger. Mutual assistance reactions could

2

AT THE CENTRE OF THE ATTACK: FROM INDIVIDUAL FEAR …

21

therefore depend on a set of factors, some psychological (how emotionally close do you feel to the rest of the crowd?) and others physical and structural (are you directly in a situation of danger? can you run away instead of helping?). In these unique situations, what is reconfigured are not different motivations (‘everyone for themselves’ vs. ‘all for one and one for all’) but survival strategies and they are reconfigured according to the situation, and to social and physical constraints. In other words, one could say that the individual, whom one can consider to be primarily driven by a need for comfort and security, adopts strategies that may or may not involve the other. This depends on the relative distance of the threat, the physical distance with these potential others and how far the exit is. Thus, depending on the circumstances, another person can be a nuisance or the most precious being there is in a world in turmoil.

References Bartolucci, A., C. Casareale, and J. Drury. 2021. Cooperative and Competitive Behaviour among Passengers during the Costa Concordia Disaster. Safety Science 134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2020.105055. Dellinger, B. 2002. World Trade Center 47e Étage. Paris: Robert Laffont. Dezecache, G. 2015. Human Collective Reactions to Threat. Wires Cognitive Science 6 (3): 209–219. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1344. _____, J.-R. Martin, C. Tessier, L. Safra, V. Pitron, P. Nuss, and J. Grèzes. 2021. Nature and Determinants of Social Actions during a Mass Shooting. PloS One, 16 (12): e0260392. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/citation? id=10.1371/journal.pone.0260392. Drury, J. 2018. The Role of Social Identity Processes in Mass Emergency Behaviour: An Integrative Review. European Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 38–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2018.1471948. _____, R. Brown, R. González, and D. Miranda. 2016. Emergent Social Identity and Observing Social Support Predict Social Support Provided by Survivors in a Disaster: Solidarity in the 2010 Chile Earthquake. European Journal of Social Psychology 46 (2): 209–223. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2146. _____, C. Cocking, and S. Reicher. 2009a. Everyone for Themselves? A Comparative Study of Crowd Solidarity among Emergency Survivors. British Journal of Social Psychology 48 (3): 487–506. _____. 2009b. The Nature of Collective Resilience: Survivor Reactions to the 2005 London Bombings. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 27(1): 66–95. Fahy, R. F., and G. Proulx. 2005. Analysis of Published Accounts of the World Trade Center Evacuation. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the

22

G. DEZECACHE

World Trade Center Disaster. National Construction Safety Team Act Reports, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD. Fenech, G., and S. Pietrasanta. 2016. Rapport fait au nom de la commission d’enquête relative aux moyens mis en œuvre par l’État pour lutter contre le terrorisme depuis le 7 janvier 2015, rapport n°3922. Assemblée Nationale. Helbing, D., and P. Mukerji. 2012. Crowd Disasters as Systemic Failures: Analysis of the Love Parade Disaster. EPJ Data Science 1 (1): 1–40. Johnson, N. R. 1987. Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order: Popular Myth, Social Theory, Empirical Evidence. Sociological Focus 20(3): 171–183. Jones, N. M., R. R. Thompson, C. Dunkel Schetter, and R. Cohen Silver. 2017. Distress and Rumor Exposure on Social Media during a Campus Lockdown. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(44): 11663–11668. Mawson, A. R. 2005. Understanding Mass Panic and Other Collective Responses to Threat and Disaster. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 68(2): 95–113. _____. 2017. Mass Panic and Social Attachment: The Dynamics of Human Behavior. Routledge. Quarantelli, E.L. 1954. The Nature and Conditions of Panic. American Journal of Sociology 60 (3): 267–275. _____ 1975. Panic Behavior: Some Empirical Observations. Preliminary Papers 20. University of Delaware: Disaster Research Center. https://udspace.udel. edu/handle/19716/393. Sapolsky, R. M. 2004. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. New York, NY, US: Holt Paperbacks. Wayment, H. A., and R. Cohen Silver. 2021. Grief and Solidarity Reactions 1 Week after an On-Campus Shooting. Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36(5– 6): NP2423–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260518766431.

CHAPTER 3

Out in the Street: Ephemeral Memorials to Express Mourning Maëlle Bazin

Abstract Many spontaneous memorials appeared after the attacks of January and November 2015, both in Paris (Place de la République and in places that had been targeted by terrorists) and in other city squares across France. In this chapter, based on observations, interviews and media archives, Maëlle Bazin analyses these testimonies of collective mourning by placing them in the context of the growing popularity of such memorials in recent years in European countries. In particular, she insists on the issues raised by their long-term preservation and the role of their media representation as a factor contributing to their naturalisation as a healing and symbolic social practice enacted after dramatic events such as terrorist attacks.

M. Bazin (B) Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Médias, Paris, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_3

23

24

M. BAZIN

Keywords Grassroots memorials · Spontaneous memorials · Terrorist attacks · Collective mourning · Grief · Social healing · Media representation

In the hours and days following a terrorist attack, it has become common to see, at the scene of the crime or in city squares, anonymous people holding vigils in tribute to the victims or depositing flowers, candles and soft toys, as well as photos, drawings and texts. This phenomenon, which has been observed after the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States and 11 March 2004 in Madrid (Truc 2017a), has taken on a particular scale in France, particularly in Paris in 2015 and in Nice in 2016 (Gensburger and Truc 2020; Becker 2017), as in the rest of Europe (Brussels, Manchester, Barcelona, etc.); and several archival departments have collected these materials to preserve a trace of the tributes (Bazin and Van Eeckenrode 2018). However, these ephemeral memorials are not specific to post-attack situations: they are observed more generally in response to the sudden occurrence of ‘bad deaths’ (Paton and Figeac 2013)—people, familiar or not, who have died in circumstances perceived as unfair—or the deaths of notable personalities (political leaders, music stars, etc.). These are hybrid sites, where practices of recollection, gathering, prayer, reading, protest and tourism cohabit, and they coexist with other modes of expression of mourning such as books of condolence, wall art, letters to the families of the victims and to the media, and messages posted on social networks. The diversity of the names used by researchers and journalists to designate these sites invites reflection: they are called memorials, altars or sanctuaries, and they are also described as spontaneous, temporary, ephemeral or popular (Santino 2006; Doss 2008; Margry and SánchezCarretero 2011). But the social, political and media attention they currently receive only makes it more urgent to investigate them. How are we to explain the repetition of the phenomenon after each new attack? Who are the actors who are mobilised around these memorials? What are the issues surrounding them? The analysis presented here is based on observations of several ephemeral memorials set up in reaction to the attacks of January and November 2015, interviews with social actors linked to these spaces (cleaning services, associations, collectives,

3

OUT IN THE STREET: EPHEMERAL MEMORIALS TO EXPRESS MOURNING

25

archivists), and a study of the place they occupy in the media treatment (written press and television).

A Mourning Ritual The phenomenon of ephemeral memorials is well documented by folklorists, ethnologists, anthropologists and historians who have taken an interest in them in various contexts (terrorist attacks, deaths of celebrities, school shootings, but also wars, natural disasters, accidents and demonstrations). They all underline that this practice is a relatively recent development, and emphasise three outstanding examples: the memorials that appeared at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, opened in 1982, those created in reaction to Lady Diana’s death in 1997 and those of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The novelty lies above all in the way these have become mass events, and in the attention, they now arouse after terrorist attacks (Margry and Sánchez-Carretero 2011). The phenomenon has tended to be repeated in Europe since 2015 with thousands of artefacts deposited each time in a public space.1 Three of their characteristics mean that they can be described as mourning rituals (Segalen 2017): their repetition, the material and symbolic inversion of the use of the space, and their codified character. Ephemeral memorials are in fact set up in areas that are not usually reserved for meditation, and whose social function is temporarily transformed, as observed Jack Santino, pioneer of research on grassroots memorials. He notes: ‘These are not graves waiting for their occasional visitors and their usual ornaments. It’s not the family that comes to visit the grave, but the “grave” that comes to the family—that is, to the public: all of us’ (Santino 2006, p. 13). We can distinguish two types: those that appear on sites struck by terrorists or nearby (the sidewalk in front of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters or the Bataclan concert hall, the terraces of cafés and restaurants for 13 November, the Promenade des Anglais in Nice) and those installed in symbolic spaces such as squares (Place de la République in Paris, Place de la Bourse in Brussels) and the areas in front of town halls or embassies. The social uses of public space are thus dramatically changed, as Sarah Gensburger notes of the Bataclan district, 1 An international research group has been established on the initiative of Konstantinos Arvanitis: Network of Spontaneous Memorials Archives (http://www.spontaneousmemo rials.org/).

26

M. BAZIN

once the ephemeral memorials had been removed: ‘Regaining access to the sidewalk was an important moment, but it is not going to make us forget the dead, or to stop the flow of visitors gathering in memory. But by allowing us to walk, to gather and to park around the Bataclan once again, restoring residents their habitual use of their neighbourhood, it also allows us to think upon the personal relations we maintain with the space in which we live, the city, its streets and buildings’ (Gensburger 2019, p. 34). This occupation of urban space involves bouquets of flowers and potted plants, wax or electric candles, soft toys, offerings and votive objects, as well as individual or collective messages, written on all sorts of media. Some objects are part of a shared culture of mourning, and others are more unusual and linked to the event or the victims (concert tickets, musical instruments or bottles of alcohol in the case of 13 November). The funeral functions of writing are thus given a new lease of life, according to anthropologist Béatrice Fraenkel, who studied the phenomenon in New York after 9/11 (Fraenkel 2002, 2011). Public writing is seen as a ‘remedy’, a way to heal the wound inflicted by the attack. The dead are named and honoured: ‘Writing the names of the dead, displaying them, reading them, having them read aloud, are still efficacious acts within our cultures, even if the latter are largely secularised’(Fraenkel 2002, p. 81). However, the forms of participation of the writers, and of the visitors to the memorials, are very diverse. Not all of them deliberately visit these sites with the intention of ‘paying homage’ to the victims. Some of them discover the memorial simply as they pass by and feel encouraged to take part in the ritual, and to favour certain formulas rather than others, by reading certain messages or by exchanging remarks on the spot with other people—and here we can see a form of ‘social conformism’ (Antichan 2017). Others come to see ‘for real’ what they have seen on television or in the press: the media coverage of ephemeral memorials also feeds the phenomenon by encouraging a certain mimicry.

Mediagenic Memorials The candles, flowers and words left for the victims are highly publicised in the media. Inserted into the reports of personal dramas, they are objects that are culturally recognised as associated with mourning (Mariau 2004). And these signs that a drama has taken place come especially to the fore

3

OUT IN THE STREET: EPHEMERAL MEMORIALS TO EXPRESS MOURNING

27

in television reports of a terrorist attacks such as the 13 November attacks or those in Nice. The ephemeral memorials are photogenic spaces, highlighted in headlines. They meet the aesthetic expectations of a media iconography in search of symbols and constitute a motif in the semiotic sense (Beyaert-Geslin 2006), contributing to the ‘legibility of the event’, while flattening out the specific features of each attack. Candles, flowers, flags and crumpled messages signal death, mourning and empathy to viewers. This motif is also observable in fiction, especially in detective or horror films where, as part of the setting, it symbolises the death of a character or contributes to the contextualisation of the story. It is likely that the presence of ephemeral memorials in the media contributes to the standardisation and internationalisation of the phenomenon. Research attests to its North American origin and to its subsequent circulation across Europe. The media coverage of memorials thus contributes to making them a conventional form of emotional expression. A few candles, a flag and a minute’s silence: the tributes paid to the victims of terrorist attacks in the French TV series Plus Belle La Vie are an example of the institutionalisation of this practice of mourning. As Héloïse Boudon notes, ‘the soap opera then becomes a derivative form of ceremonial television, mobilizing its loyal audience in meditation and playing a part in the creation of national cohesion’ (Boudon 2019, p. 181). The regular presence of the motif of ephemeral memorials in the media coverage of the attacks thus signals the growing role played in the process by civil society. Journalists are paying more and more attention in such circumstances to the emotional reactions and words of ordinary citizens (Garcin-Marrou and Hare 2019)—reactions that themselves have become intrinsically more visible with the Internet and social media. Also, ephemeral memorials provide journalists with opportunities to interview passers-by. This journalistic technique makes it possible to combine the multiplication and juxtaposition of examples with a universalist approach. It is as if the protagonists constitute the pieces of a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ (Sécail 2016) and, once assembled, they form an image of the ‘people’s emotion’ (Bazin 2018). The staging of civil society reactions therefore appears to be an editorial choice that creates proximity with different publics, now called upon to identify with bereaved individuals. The continuum is particularly evident when the tributes to the victims that make up the memorials are themselves newspaper headlines, as was the case in January

28

M. BAZIN

2015. Europe has experienced, over the last few years, a form of ritualisation in the management of civil emotions after terrorist attacks, taken up by, but also constructed in, the media.

Making the Ephemeral Last (or Not) Then comes the time when life, as they say, ‘must go on’. This transition, very often, is a somewhat incidental matter in the case of ephemeral memorials: as time passes, we observe a drop in the number of visitors to the site and mementos left there, accompanied by a gradual return to ordinary uses of the public space in which the memorial was set up. It is not possible to determine a ‘duration’ that would be common to all memorials. On the Place de la République, people no longer walked around the central statue looking at the offerings, but started sitting down on its base again, as is the customary practice; the fountain was put back into service, and skateboarders began to reclaim the site. In the spring of 2016, a social movement protesting against labour reforms transformed the use of city squares: named Nuit debout, it was characterised by the organisation of nightly debates in public spaces. This new form of action had paradoxical consequences: on the one hand, it revived the frequentation of the memorial, and on the other, it accelerated its trivialisation. Eventually, the central statue was cleaned up of artefacts and tags. It was fully restored in August 2016, more than a year and a half after the affixing of the first writings put up in solidarity with the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. The public authorities are stakeholders in this process: they are the ones who decide to leave a memorial in place for as long as possible, or until it just fades away, or they can decide to remove it after a certain period of time. When they choose the latter, they take into account several factors: the perceived intensity of popular emotion, the characteristics of the memorialised site, weather conditions, etc. In France, a number of local authorities asked their cleaning services to temporarily suspend or to adapt their interventions around the ad hoc memorials to the attacks of January and November 2015. As a consequence, in many cases, the tributes remained in place for several days, or even months, before being eventually either discarded or collected by archive departments. The difficulty for public authorities lies in having to combine the sometimes contradictory expectations expressed by local residents: indeed, they both

3

OUT IN THE STREET: EPHEMERAL MEMORIALS TO EXPRESS MOURNING

29

long for a return to normalcy and crave for the preservation of the memorial. The example of the memorial that was set up Place de la République in January 2015 is particularly interesting. It lasted over a year and a half and owed its longevity to a group of ‘guardians of memory’ who opposed the withdrawal of tributes. They got together to ensure the preservation of signs that the memory of the victims lived on (Truc and Bazin 2019). Other reactions testify to a form of ‘sacralisation’ of these memorials. In Rennes, after the intervention of the archive department in January 2015, one could read on the façade of the Town Hall: ‘Who did that? Who took away our candles? Who took away our pencils? Who swept away our anger? Who hides our tears? Give us back what we left here!’. To avoid such situations, that is to say free up public space without giving the impression of brutally wiping out popular expressions of collective mourning, protocols were developed in order to inform the population (press releases, signage, etc.). The media also play a part and report increasingly often on the archiving of ephemeral memorials and on their future. Thousands of such traces were thus preserved in France after the 2015 and 2016 attacks (Bazin and Van Eeckenrode 2018): in Rennes, Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, Paris and Nice. After the 13 November attacks, the Archives of Paris set up an elaborate protocol for collecting such documents (Ceselli and Pintault 2018), which made it possible to preserve some 7,700 items.2 Similar projects have also seen the light of day in other parts of Europe, and the materials collected can be consulted online.3 The collecting of ephemeral memorials is thus on the way to becoming a routine archival practice, in the eyes of professionals and the general public. Between 2015 and 2016, the Rennes archives, for example, organised four such collections of traces, each ultimately being integrated into a larger corpus entitled ‘The memory of the attacks’ (‘La mémoire des attentats ’).

2 The digitalised documents can be seen online: http://archives.paris.fr/r/137/hom mages-aux-victimes-des-attentats-de-2015/. 3 See the website ‘Manchester Together’ (https://mcrtogetherarchive.org/) and, for Barcelona, ‘Memorial la Rambla 17A’ (https://www.barcelona.cat/memorialrambla1 7a/ca).

30

M. BAZIN

A Staging of ‘Resilience’? However, the purpose of these collections, carried out in accordance with current events and often in a state of urgency and high emotions, is not always explicit. Why and for whom does the archivist collect? To commemorate, to preserve a common heritage, or to ‘forestall any criticism over material being lost’ (Artières 2018, p. 122)? The archiving of ephemeral memorials ultimately becomes part of the post-terrorist collective mourning ritual: online collections extend the physical memorial on which they, at the same time, confer historical value. Gérôme Truc sees in this archival practice ‘a clear manifestation of the “presentism” of our time’ (Truc 2017b, p. 47). It testifies to the particular relation which we maintain with the memory of the events we experience as ‘historical’ or ‘traumatic’. These collections are sometimes carried out on the initiative of researchers, concerned about the ‘sources’ that historians of the future will be able to use when they look back to this period; for these researchers, such artefacts also constitute a ‘material’ for investigation of the contemporary that document how civil society reacts to attacks, and the evolution of mourning rituals. A notable example is constituted by the Archivo del Duelo, a project directed by an anthropologist from the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, which conserves the memorials that appeared in Madrid after the terrorist attack of 11 March 2004 (Sánchez-Carretero 2011). In France, a team of social scientists collaborated with the Archives de Paris after the 13 November attacks (Gensburger and Truc 2020). Sometimes, too, archiving is carried out at the request of the families of the victims. But in any case, the decision to preserve or not the content of these memorials lies with the political sphere, which may be guided by its own purpose and interests as well as by concerns about the preservation of future historical sources. Tributes to victims that are collected in the street can be considered as spontaneous and authentic manifestations of a society united in its ordeal. They are therefore likely to fuel the rhetoric of national unity and resilience in the face of terrorism. In the foreword to the book Je suis Paris , compiling facsimiles of tributes collected by the Archives of Paris in the memorials to the victims of 13 November, Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, appeals to an idealised vision of the Parisian people: ‘They have killed and injured many of us - but they have failed to destroy what we are irrespective of our origins, our paths and our horizons: a fraternal society, in which the emancipation of each person contributes to peace among all.

3

OUT IN THE STREET: EPHEMERAL MEMORIALS TO EXPRESS MOURNING

31

[…] These words have flourished on the Place de la République and in all the places where Parisians have converged as one, and affirmed with invincible dignity both their desire to be themselves and their desire to be together’ (Hidalgo 2016, p. 5). However, anyone who bothers to look beyond the drawings of the Eiffel Tower or Marianne in tears, and the repetitions of the motto of Paris Fluctuat nec mergitur, will find many things beyond a shared impetus in these documents: reactions that can be summed up in a few words, and others that are more personal; and messages that are not just the work of Parisians, but of French people of all origins, and many foreigners, equally ‘touched’. And this is ultimately where their richness lies: if these ephemeral memorials seem to bear witness to the emotional communion of a social group—the Parisians or the French in the case of memorials to 13 November—they also reveal a plurality of relationships to the attack and its victims. The make-up of a community of mourning is complex and the borders of such a community may be more blurred than one imagines at first glance.

References Antichan, S. 2017. Comment étudier les pratiques mémorielles liées aux attentats? Plaidoyer pour des sciences sociales ordinaires. Genèses 109 (4): 139–156. https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.109.0139. Artières, P. 2018. Écritures éphémères, écritures fragmentaires, écritures ordinaires. Communication & Languages 197: 111–124. https://doi.org/10. 3917/comla1.197.0111. Bazin, M. 2018. Peuples en larmes, peuples en marches: la médiatisation des affects lors des attentats de janvier 2015. Mots. Les langages du politique 118(3): 75–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23653. _____, and M. Van Eeckenrode, eds. 2018. Mise en archives des réactions postattentats: enjeux et perspectives. La Gazette des archives 250. Becker, A. 2017. Faire parler les objets? Entre affliction et kitsch, Nice après l’attentat du 14 juillet 2016. Mémoires En Jeu 4: 60–64. Beyaert-Geslin, A. 2006. L’image ressassée: photo de presse et photo d’art. Communication & Languages 147: 119–135. Boudon, H. 2019. Du feuilleton populaire à la télévision cérémonielle: quand Plus belle la vie rend hommage aux victimes des attentats. Le Temps des médias 32: 170–183. https://doi.org/10.3917/tdm.032.0170.

32

M. BAZIN

Ceselli, A., and M. Pintault. 2018. De la rue aux Archives de Paris: le traitement des hommages aux victimes des attentats de novembre 2015. La Gazette des archives 250: 193–206. Doss, E. 2008. The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials. Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fraenkel, B. 2002. Les écrits de septembre: New York 2001. Paris: Textuel. _____. 2011. Street Shrines and the Writing of Disaster. In Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memoralizing Traumatic Death, ed. P. J. Margry and C. Sánchez-Carretero, 229–243. New York: Berghahn Books. Garcin-Marrou, I., and I. Hare. 2019. Presse écrite et événement terroriste: routines narratives et émergence de la société civile (1995–2016). Le Temps des medias 32: 153–169. https://doi.org/10.3917/tdm.032.0153. Gensburger, S. 2019. Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016. Leuven: Leuven University Press. _____, and G. Truc, eds. 2020. Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre. Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS. Hidalgo, A. 2016. Avant-Propos. In Je suis Paris: un millier d’hommages recueillis sur les lieux des attentats du 13 novembre. Neuilly-sur-Seine: Michel Lafon. Margry, P.J., and C. Sánchez-Carretero, eds. 2011. Grassroots Memorials. The Politics of Memoralizing Traumatic Death. New York: Berghahn Books. Mariau, B. 2004. Écrire le fait divers à la télévision. La rhétorique émotionnelle du drame personnel au journal télévisé de TF1. PhD dissertation. Université Paris 4. Paton, N., and J. Figeac. 2013. La commémoration des “mauvais morts” au sein des sanctuaires spontanés numériques. Les Cahiers Du Numérique 9: 241– 270. https://doi.org/10.3166/LCN.9.3-4.241-270. Sánchez-Carretero, C., ed. 2011. El Archivo del duelo: análisis de la respuesta ciudadana ante los atentados del 11 de marzo en Madrid. Madrid: CSIC. Santino, J., ed. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sécail, C. 2016. L’histoire en marche (républicaine): l’information continue et “l’esprit du 11 janvier”. In Le Défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats, ed. P. Lefébure and C. Sécail, 117–152. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Segalen, M. 2017. Rites et rituels contemporains. Paris: Armand Colin. Truc, G. 2017a. Shell Shocked: The Social Reponse to Terrorist Attacks. Trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. _____. 2017b. Mémorialisations immédiates. Mémoires en jeu 4: 46–49. _____, and M. Bazin. 2019. Guardians of Memory: Mobilizations and Conflicts of Appropriation Surrounding Post-terrorist Attack Memorials in Madrid, London, and Paris. Ethnologie française 173(1): 63–75. https://doi.org/10. 3917/ethn.191.0063.

CHAPTER 4

On Television: Journalists Caught Between Rival Demands Pierre Lefébure and Claire Sécail

Abstract Terrorist attacks generate intense media coverage, in which horror is constructed as a communication framework that brings together performances of propaganda, information, reaction and reception. This results in irreducible complexity for journalists who must inform the public while being an active part of this same communications framework. These issues are particularly important for television, which finds itself at the centre of recurring and heated public debates about the role of the media in relation to terrorism. This chapter analyses the factors explaining

P. Lefébure Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] C. Sécail (B) CNRS, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_4

33

34

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

the evolution of the regulatory framework for broadcast media since the Islamist attacks of the 1990s. Keywords Media coverage · Television · Terrorist attacks · Journalistic practices · News · Regulatory authority · Broadcasting sector · Deontology

Terrorist attacks generate intense media coverage, in which horror is constructed as a communications framework that brings together performances of propaganda, information, reaction and reception (Norris et al. 2003; Kavoori and Fraley 2006; Matusitz 2012; Dayan 2006; Lefébure and Sécail 2016a). This results in irreducible complexity for journalists who, when an attack occurs, must inform the public while being an active part of this same communications framework. In France, their difficulties in doing so are increased by the need to maintain their independence in the production of an informational narrative while being subjected to growing ethical controls by public authorities (Graber 2003; GarcinMarrou 2001). From the 1950s to the 1980s, the audiovisual sector (radio/television) remained a public monopoly under the direct control of the executive. However, the presidential and legislative elections 1981 brought a radical political change. President F. Mitterrand, and his coalition government led by the Parti socialiste, decided to guarantee the independence of this public monopoly sector. In 1982, the Council of Ministers relinquished its control and the legislator created an independent administrative authority. To date, the audiovisual sector (public as well as private) remains regulated and controlled by the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA, as it is now called and thereafter in this chapter). Few countries in the world have a comparable organisation, the notable exceptions being Belgium (CSA) and Chile (CNTV). The issues related to the media coverage of terrorist attacks are not new (Bazin et al. 2019), and they are particularly important for television, a medium of images, sounds and commentary. Indeed, television plays a crucial role in the definition of the meanings and scope of these events, as they unfold. In 2015, television networks began monitoring almost immediately after the January and November attacks occurred (as they had done after 11 September 2001): they provided live coverage and live commentaries and interviewed many of the people directly involved

4

ON TELEVISION: JOURNALISTS CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVAL DEMANDS

35

(Lamy 2006; Aubert et al. 2018; Lefébure et al. 2018). In the early hours, when the news ‘breaks,’ the broadcasting conditions are characterised by uncertainty about what is happening. Such circumstances increase the risk of confusion, inaccuracy and ethical misconduct. This is why the verbal reporting and televised images of the attacks are the subject of increased institutional and cultural vigilance. In France, the production and publication of news are governed by numerous pieces of legislation: such as 29 July 1881 Law on Freedom of the press, the charter of professional ethics for journalists, the internal charters of ethics established by certain media and so on. But the French public authorities now consider these regulatory frameworks to be inadequate in view of the specificity of terrorism and of the emotion it arouses in public opinion. Since the 1990s, the effects, real or supposed, of these events on society have led to the creations of ad hoc processes of media coverage supervision. The series of attacks on the French soil by ISIS in 2015–2016 has accelerated the institutionalisation of such controls. Faced with the possibility of an ‘ethical turn’ in administrative control, and under public pressure, media professionals have recently become aware of the advantage of making public their debates, previously internal, on the treatment of terrorist attacks.1

The Ambivalent Institutionalisation of the Media Stakes of Attacks The already mentioned CSA acts as the regulator of French broadcasting. It was created in 1989 to replace the previous regulatory authority set up by the right-wing majority under the double executive’s cohabitation period (CNCL 1986–1989). Its role involves monitoring how radio and television broadcasters meet their obligations, including in the area of information; it oversees for instance representation of diversity; political pluralism, in particular during election periods; respect for human dignity; protection of minors; etc., and it sanctions eventual failures.2 In the early 1 The present study is part of the project SENSI-TV-T, with the support of the CNRS, and the project MEDIATERR, linked to Équipex DIME-SHS. 2 For example, on 18 March 2021, the CSA imposed—for the first time on a 24hour news channel—a fine of 200,000 euros on the private channel CNews for ‘inciting hatred’ and ‘violence’, after a polemicist described underage migrants as ‘thieves’, ‘rapists’ and ‘murderers’.

36

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

1990s, the CSA refused to deal with the coverage of terrorist attacks despite the expression of public shock regarding their media coverage and their endorsement by President Jacques Chirac himself.3 Speaking a month after the attack on the Saint-Michel station (25 July 1995), the CSA welcomed the mobilisation of channels ‘to offer viewers information in real time […] overall, the relating of these events has not given rise to serious abuses, with the exception of the disclosure of detailed information on the investigation in progress, which would be liable to harm the proper conduct of this investigation.’4 The CSA simply maintained that it was ‘useless to occupy air time unduly when no new information can be provided.’ At the time and it is important, there were only two 24-hours news channels (France Info, a state-owned radio channel, and LCI a subscription TV channel) and professional practices had not been yet restructured. The wave of attacks perpetrated by Al-Qaeda in the 2000s was a gamechanger, but the regulator hardened its position towards media editorial staff only in reaction to attacks on French soil. This happened in March 2012, when, in the middle of the presidential election campaign, a 24year-old French-Algerian man organised three attacks against soldiers and a Jewish school, killing seven people (including three children) in Toulouse and Montauban. By then, the broadcasting landscape had been thoroughly reshaped: in 2005, several 24/7 news channels were launched on digital networks (including BFMTV and i-Télé); digital media channels developed a few years later, including social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The new ecosystem is characterised by hyperreactive and competitive media practices, and increased pressures on journalists responsible for controlling live coverage. In 2012, the CSA served two formal notices against France 3 and BFMTV (for their erroneous announcement of the arrest of Merah)5 and issued a warning against TF1 (for sound clips of an exchange between the police and Merah

3 ‘I simply note that the extraordinary lack of media discipline which characterised these attacks was unparalleled in any country in the world, and undoubtedly exceeded all the hopes that the terrorists might have placed in their endeavour to destabilise French society. […] Everyone in life must assume their responsibilities’ (TV news, 1 pm, France 2, 5 September 1995). 4 CSA, Circular of 24 August 1995 on the accuracy of the information and the verification of sources (coverage of the attacks). 5 CSA, verdict of 24 April 2012.

4

ON TELEVISION: JOURNALISTS CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVAL DEMANDS

37

at the time of the assault in the magazine/current affairs programme Sept à huit ).6 The CSA initiated a consultation with broadcasters; it published a ‘recommendation’, reminding broadcasters of the necessity to respect principles such as dignity of the human person, public order and accuracy of information; it also announced that, ‘taking into account the evolution of the international context,’7 it would broaden its supervision role to include the subject of terrorism. The attacks of January 2015 further increased tensions between broadcasters and their regulatory authority. Indeed, the latter noted new and serious breaches, such as the disclosure of information revealing ongoing police operations, the hiding places of victims during the supermarket hostage situation—exposing them to being caught—and the identity of terrorists. Taking into account ‘the emotion of the public,’8 the CSA issued fifteen warnings and twenty-one formal notices against some fifteen broadcasters.9 Several media responded by accusing the CSA of infringing on their freedoms (of expression and of conscience, of journalists) on the ill-defined grounds of ‘disturbance to public order’ (‘trouble à l’ordre public’). They unsuccessfully filed an appeal to the Council of State—the highest administrative court. The CSA was not the only institution to consider these issues. In January 2016, the National Assembly created a Commission of inquiry into the attacks, whose remit included media coverage. The Commission heard witnesses from all sides: representatives of victims’ associations, members of medical staff and law enforcement officials, intelligence officers, politicians, press and broadcasting figures. Its final report noted that ‘the place and role of the media in the context of a terrorist attack have not been properly defined’10 and regretted that ‘the presence of journalists on the sites concerned and the revelation of sensitive information might disturb the action of the homeland security forces, emergency services or intelligence services, and endanger the people 6 CSA, verdict of 10 July 2012. 7 CSA, Recommendation no. 2013-04 of 20 November 2013 on the treatment of

international conflicts, civil wars and terrorist acts by broadcasting bodies. 8 Le Monde, 23 June 2015. 9 CSA, communiqué of 12 February 2015. 10 Report by the Parliamentary Commission investigating the means implemented by

the state in the struggle against terrorism since 7 January 2015, published by the Assemblée Nationale, 5 July 2016.

38

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

involved.’ All these criticisms concerned the attacks of January 2015; indeed, the Rapporteurs did not identify ‘similar difficulties’ for those of 13 November. In this latter case, they agreed with the conclusions of the CSA on the absence of any breach, with the exception of news report by M6 showing the intervention of the fire brigade at the site of the shootings. The commercial broadcaster did not warn viewers of the violence of the images—in compliance with the CSA’s youth signage which aims to protect young audiences from certain content.11 Had journalists learned the lessons of the CSA sanctions in the aftermath of the January attacks? This was ‘not in any doubt’ according to the Rapporteurs, who nevertheless underlined the singularity of each attack, notably in terms of its duration and its configuration. However, the media coverage of terrorist attacks remains under the scrutiny of the legislator: the report of the Commission of inquiry concluded that ‘the specificity of a mass killing requires that specific rules apply so that the protection of public order will be seamless.’ It made two recommendations in order to address the susceptibility of the media to seek, and report on, leaks. On the one hand, parliamentarians called for ‘a reflection on the media treatment of a terrorist attack in order to define the role and obligations of journalists and social networks’ as well as ‘the terms of collaboration between the public authorities and the media in a context of this type.’ On the other hand, taking up the suggestion of magistrates from the public prosecutor’s office (responsible for requesting the application of the law), they recommended the definition of a new offence ‘characterised by the dissemination—in any medium— of information likely to cause prejudice to any person present at the place of an attack.’ Attentive to the new digital environment, legislators were thus broadening the scope of their reflection beyond the perimeter of the broadcasting regulator. The attack of 14 July 2016 in Nice took place a few days after the submission of this report. Controversies over the coverage of the event led to the introduction—in the law of 21 July 2016 extending the application of the law of 3 April 1955 relating to the state of emergency and establishing measures to strengthen the fight against terrorism—of a provision instructing the CSA to draw up ‘a code of good conduct relating to broadcast coverage of terrorist acts.’ After a two-month

11 CSA, press release of 25 November 2015.

4

ON TELEVISION: JOURNALISTS CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVAL DEMANDS

39

consultation with media professionals, experts, magistrates, victims’ associations and researchers, the CSA published a list of ‘recommendations designed to allow the media to reconcile as much as possible, in the treatment of terrorist acts, the essential imperative of freedom of information with other imperatives of a general interest.’12 These recommendations stopped short of the introduction of stricter rules (for instance a mandatory short time lapse in broadcasting, rather than live reporting) and set out the limits of general rules. While renewing the call to respect the action of the police forces and the principles of protecting the public and human dignity, the CSA stated that ‘the questions raised by the coverage of terrorist events’ could not be treated ‘solely with regard to the diversity of situations encountered’; its list of precautions was ‘intended to be adapted to the specific circumstances of news editors.’ However, in order to appease broadcasters’ protestations that their editorial freedom was being curtailed by the authorities, the CSA also recognised the ‘work of analysis and reflection’ carried out ‘in all the newsrooms’ and ‘their spirit of responsibility.’ Finally, the CSA expressed its concerns regarding the representation of terrorists and the risk of dissemination of their propaganda. It reaffirmed that the anonymity of the perpetrators of terrorist acts needed to be decided by editorial staff, but it also indicated that the treatment of their personality and their background must not ‘present them in a way that could be perceived as positive or would be likely to offend the victims, their relatives or the public.’ Considerations on editorial decisions were thus introduced in connection with regulatory laws and the respect due to the sensitivity of the public.

Professional Practices and Public Controversies Faced with political and administrative institutions, media professionals have so far mainly sought to defend the principles of autonomy and selfregulation, or indeed co-regulation,13 by contesting the growing desire of the CSA to deal with news content and questions of ethics. 12 CSA, Précautions relatives à la couverture audiovisuelle d’actes terroristes, 25 October 2016. 13 This measure was defended by the Observatory for Information Ethics (ODI) and involved creating an independent body made up of representatives of the profession and the public.

40

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

When Jacques Chirac denounced ‘the extraordinary lack of media discipline’ in 1995, print journalists protested against what they perceived as calls for self-censorship. ‘Excessive and unfair, the words of the head of state are surprising. […] The public authorities have chosen, once again, to designate the media as a scapegoat,’ wrote Le Monde disapprovingly.14 The broadcasting sector, however, kept a lower profile: the CEO of France Télévisions admitted: ‘How can we not wonder about the possible misuse of information which, by dint of seeking the spectacular, may play into the hands of terrorists?’15 Moreover, the directors of broadcast channels accepted the invitation of the president of the CSA to organise a meeting ‘to put an end to possible abuses and obstacles related to the processing of information’16 in the event of an attack. Only the News director of TF1 rejected the criticism that terrorist events were relayed non-stop in a sensationalist way: ‘the worst response to blind terrorism would be silence and withholding information which would give free rein to rumours, and actually cause a real psychosis.’17 In order to back up its claim to be dealing adequately with ethics, the CSA introduced the principle of ‘accuracy of information’ into the broadcasters’ charters in 1997. It did not offer a precise legal definition, but linked it to the notion of the public’s right to quality information. Finally, the CSA decided that it would intervene either in response to a formal complaint or through self-referral (Agnès 2013). While the next president of the CSA (2001–2007) did not share this ‘ethical’ conception of the regulatory authority, the CSA did revive its interventionist approach in 2012 with the creation of an ‘ethics’ working group, headed by Rachid Arhab, a member of the Conseil and a former journalist. The ethical control on the treatment of terrorist events was first applied when France 3, BFMTV and TF1 were sanctioned. Such decisions united journalists in their criticism of the regulatory authority: they publicly denounced the CSA as ‘moralising’ and ‘mixing everything up,’18 and complained about ‘the repressive and disproportionate reaction of the

14 Le Monde, 7 September 1995. 15 Ibid. 16 Libération, 6 September 1995. 17 Libération, 8 September 1995. 18 Le Point, 10 July 2012.

4

ON TELEVISION: JOURNALISTS CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVAL DEMANDS

41

French authorities.’19 There were indeed a few instances of professional self-reflection on ethical matters, but they took place inside editorial offices. Indeed, most programmes dedicated to providing feedback or to responding to comments from the audience have disappeared from broadcasting schedules. On these issues, it appears that the public’s views were not particularly sought after. However, the shock of the 2015–2016 attacks triggered discussions on the journalistic treatment of the attacks, which included a broader set of participants. The strong criticisms expressed by the public in the face of blunders—live broadcasting of information that could endanger the lives of hostages, broadcasting of images of victims that violate human dignity, etc. (Demirdjian 2017)—and the mobilisation of professionals opposed to the sanctions of the CSA ‘have provoked everywhere - as rarely happens - debriefings, collective reflections […] [and] have made it possible to unite all the media concerned.’20 As a consequence of the surge in public interest, new programmes were introduced, focusing on the ‘making of’ news, highlighting the processes through which news stories are constructed. These innovations showed that journalists have realised that it is in their interest (and part of their vocation) to call audiences to witness the complexity of their work. This shift was accentuated by the controversy over the publication of the names and photographs of terrorists, following several attacks outside of Paris in the summer of 2016.21 Should the perpetrators of attacks remain anonymous? Editors in different media openly raised the question among their peers, reformulating the old tension between the need to inform the public and the concern not to glorify terrorists. Following Le Monde’s decision,22 BFMTV and France24 also came out in favour of the non-publication of photos that could be perceived as propaganda

19 Reporters sans frontières, quoted in Libération, 10 July 2012. 20 ODI, Rapport sur les journées de janvier 2015, 13 March 2015. 21 86 people were killed (and 458 injured) by a truck on 14 July celebrations in Nice and a priest was killed during mass in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (26 July). There were op-eds on the radio (France Culture,15 July) and in the press (Le Monde, 16 July); and a petition ‘asking for the anonymity of terrorists in the media’, launched on 18 July 2016 on Change.org, attracted over 165,000 signatures in just a few weeks. 22 ‘Following the attack in Nice, we will no longer be publishing the photos of those who carry out these killings, so as to avoid any posthumous glorification’ (Le Monde, 27 July 2016).

42

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

but they rejected anonymisation. AFP, TF1, the Huffington Post and Le Figaro adopted a nuanced approach and did not refrain from the publication of some photos and some names. Among the hardliners deciding not to publish any photos or names of terrorists, it came as no surprise to find two non-visual media, La Croix and Europe 1. Finally, Libération, France Inter and France Télévisions defended the idea that ‘a published photo will not change the strategy of the terrorists.’23 They rejected any restrictions on principle and asserted their autonomy of judgement, on a case-by-case basis. Regardless of the benchmarks chosen, it appears that good practice is compromised by the conditions under which information is produced (division of labour, segmentation of writing, fragmentation of decisions, etc.) and by the systemic environment (competition between media, direct pressure, etc.). The difficulties encountered in implementing professional autonomy were revealed when France 2 broadcast the interview of a man, filmed next to the corpse of his wife (covered with a sheet) soon after the attack in Nice. The images sparked public indignation on social networks. France Télévisions apologised: ‘the shocking testimonies and images […], which have not been verified in the customary way, have aroused strong reactions […]. An error in judgment was made due to these particular circumstances.’24 However, these ‘particular circumstances’ were not exclusively related to the attack itself but also include the structural conditions of the organisation of the production of news during an unfolding event. In this case, reporters were responding to their editors’ pressing demands for footage material. The journalists on the ground focused on their fieldwork; they took for granted that their superiors would perform the necessary editing or blurring of the material sent before its release (Demirdjian 2017). Some of the harshest criticism came from other professionals: they voiced their disapproval in the public arena of social media in order to better extricate themselves from the generic accusations of their audiences. If these debates were local and specific, they were now played out in the open, allowing audiences to contribute, to challenge editorial choices and to express their sensitivity to materials considered shocking.

23 Libération, 28 July 2016. 24 Communiqué of France Télévisions, 15 July 2016.

4

ON TELEVISION: JOURNALISTS CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVAL DEMANDS

43

This breaking down of the walls between journalists, public institutions, victims’ associations and the general public allowed connections to be made between non-expert criticism, professional criticism and the justification for regulation.

Learning Good Practices? The issue of good journalistic practices during and after terrorist attacks highlights the ongoing tensions between respect for general principles and the need for a case-by-case approach. As people feel directly concerned by terrorist attacks, they are prone to strong emotions and more likely express harsh judgements (Lefébure and Sécail 2016b). Media professionals seeking to justify themselves by invoking the conditions of production of information find themselves on their backfoot. Terrorism puts society as well as media professionals to the test; but, even more, it puts the relationship between society and the media to the test because it questions the role and the responsibilities of journalists. The belated breaking down of the walls between these questions in France results both from a particular context (a heightened terrorist threat) and from a process (the institutionalisation of the ethical debate by the regulators, the questions raised by civil society and the reactions of the media). However, it is unlikely that the concerns of the public, and of public institutions, relating to the media coverage of attacks, will induce a more structured self-awareness on the part of professionals and thus lead to the spread of good practices. There are several reasons for this. First, journalistic careers are marked by high levels of mobility between outlets, and this does not facilitate the transmission of know-how between professionals. Second, the imperatives of live broadcasting weigh heavily not only on the conditions under which information is collected but also on the conditions under which it is editorially processed through the hierarchy of decision-makers in the newsroom and through the production process. Finally, there are too few opportunities for the media to engage in exercises of self-assessment and self-reflection outside of the constant pressure of current events. Many professionals consider that there is a need for places that would allow the development of a learning process, within and among editorial staff. For them, however, the stakes are especially high, as they are caught between the regulatory authority’s demands for the development of new ethical procedures and the growing mistrust shown by citizens towards news media.

44

P. LEFÉBURE AND C. SÉCAIL

References Agnès, Y. 2013. Les ambitions régulatrices du CSA. Bulletin de Préfiguration d’un Conseil de Presse en France 24: 1–2. Aubert, A., P. Charaudeau, and D. Mehl. 2018. Les attentats du 13 novembre sur BFM TV: informer en direct face au défi terroriste. Réseaux 207 (1): 229–254. Bazin, M., G. Ferragu, and C. Sécail, eds. 2019. Special Issue: L’attentat, du tyrannicide au terrorisme. Le Temps des médias 32 (1): 219. Dayan, D. (ed.) 2006. La terreur spectacle: terrorisme et télévision. Louvain-laNeuve: De Boeck. Demirdjian, L. 2017. Le traitement médiatique du terrorisme: l’autonomie des journalistes à l’épreuve des critiques. Master’s dissertation. EHESS. Garcin-Marrou, I. 2001. Terrorisme, médias et démocratie. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Graber, D.A. 2003. Terrorism, Censorship and the 1st Amendment: In Search of Policy Guidelines. In Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public, ed. P. Norris, K. Montague, and J. Marion, 27–42. New York: Routledge. Kavoori, A.P., and T. Fraley, eds. 2006. Media, Terrorism, and Theory: A Reader. Lanham/Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield. Lamy, A. 2006. Les spécificités du traitement médiatique dans l’urgence: l’exemple des attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Communication & Organisation 29: 108–122. Lefébure, P., and C. Sécail, eds. 2016a. Le défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Free access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes. fr/hal-01273505. ———. 2016b. La critique des publics. Les courriers du médiateur de l’information de France 2. In Le défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats, ed. P. Lefébure and C. Sécail, 279–314. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Lefébure, P., E. Roche, and C. Sécail. 2018. Les attentats du 13 novembre en direct à la télévision: mise en récit de l’événement et de ses ramifications. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118: 37–57. Matusitz, J. 2012. Terrorism and Communication: A Critical Introduction. New York: Sage. Norris, P., K. Montague, and J. Marion, eds. 2003. Framing Terrorism: The News Media, the Government and the Public. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

On the Internet: From Conflicting Values to Counter-Publics Romain Badouard

Abstract During the attacks that have affected France and many other countries since 2015, social media have been spaces where one can obtain live information, organise solidarity actions and express one’s emotions. But they have also been arenas for the formation of counterpublics, producing and disseminating forms of discourse in opposition to the ‘dominant political and media discourse’. In this chapter, Romain Badouard shows how these alternative arenas preserve a certain radical pluralism of opinions and argues against the temptation to confuse them with other forms of reaction characterised by a desire to manipulate public opinion or to legitimise the use of physical violence. Keywords Social media · Internet · Counter-publics · Terrorist attacks · Pluralism · Conspiracy theories R. Badouard (B) Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Médias, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_5

45

46

R. BADOUARD

During the attacks that have affected France and many other countries since 2015, social media have been spaces where one can obtain live information, organise solidarity actions and show compassion, anger or mourning. But they have also been arenas for the formation of counterpublics (Fraser 2011), producing and disseminating forms of discourse in opposition to the ‘dominant political and media discourse’.1 While these alternative arenas enrich contemporary public debate by guaranteeing a certain radical pluralism of opinions (Badouard 2017), they should not be assimilated to other forms of reaction that go against mainstream emotion, such as conspiracy theories, incitements to hatred and jihadist propaganda, all characterised by a desire to manipulate public opinion or to legitimise the use of physical violence. This chapter provides a non-exhaustive overview of online reactions to the attacks that affected France in 2015 and 2016. Anchored in the analysis of digital practices, it draws on the results of field surveys and a review of academic work on the subject, and shows how the Web and social media reflect the conflicts of values and rationalities that run through French society today.

Social Media and the Shaping of Collective Emotion Expressing one’s emotion when an attack has taken place is both a moral injunction, insofar as its absence can be interpreted as a failing, and a social norm, which involves expressing it in a certain way (Truc 2017). This expression is conditioned by its context, by the mechanisms which allow it to be formalised, and by its temporality. Social scientists, in Europe (Innes et al. 2018; Eriksson Krutök and Lindgren 2018; Vanderbiest 2016; Burnap et al. 2014; Truc 2020) and in North America (Berube et al. 2020), have characterised the different phases of reactions to online attacks, based on the analysis of large databases drawn from social media. The first phase is often that of information: social media are spaces where one can learn about the current event live, through testimonies from people present on site. The photos, videos and writings posted feed journalistic stories and allow Internet users to follow developments. According 1 In times of a terrorist attack, politicians as well as journalists tend to emphasise emotion, reflection and unity in the way they contextualise events. For an in-depth analysis of these discourses, see Truc et al. (2018).

5

ON THE INTERNET …

47

to Nicolas Vanderbiest, this first phase is characterised by messages that are relatively ‘neutral’ on an emotional level and by descriptive hashtags often indicating the location of the event, such as the use of ‘#nice’ in July 2016 or ‘#paris’ in November 2015. In the course of an attack, social media are also the stage where solidarity and mutual aid can be performed (Garcia and Rime 2019). On the evening of 13 November, for example, the hashtag #PorteOuverte enabled Parisian Internet users to publish their addresses and welcome victims and witnesses to the attacks who could not reach their own homes. Used more than 200,000 times on Twitter in the course of the evening, it resurfaced during the Nice attacks (‘#PorteOuverteNice’). Internet users without news of their relatives also published requests for information and asked their contacts to share them as much as possible (‘#RechercheParis’ on 13 November, ‘#RechercheNice’ on 14 July), on Twitter and on Facebook. Messages from the authorities, indicating the emergency numbers to dial or the security procedures to follow, were particularly frequently forwarded (some messages from the police headquarters were retweeted several thousand times on the night of 13 November), as were those asking Internet users to donate blood. Digital platforms played a proactive role in these outbursts of solidarity, breaking with their usual policy of non-intervention in the kind of content they host. For example, on the evening of the 13 November attacks, Facebook activated the ‘Safety Check’ feature, previously reserved for natural disasters, allowing Internet users in the area of the attacks to notify their contacts that they were safe. More than 4 million Internet users used this feature. For its part, Twitter posted messages on Internet users’ timelines urging them to follow the authorities’ accounts in order to have access to reliable information and to limit the spread of rumours. These interventions, in fact, proved controversial: the day before the attacks of 13 November, an attack in Beirut that left 43 dead had not triggered such a burst of activity on the relevant platforms. This gave rise to a polemic about the ethnocentrism of Internet users and the selective nature of their collective indignation (Jouan 2017). In addition to messages of information and mutual aid, those expressing emotion soon appeared. Social media are spaces conducive to the expression of ordinary feelings (Oksanen et al. 2020; Allard et al. 2017) and they become the place for an unusually widespread communion. Messages of support, anger, sadness or mourning converge through common hashtags on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. #PrayForParis

48

R. BADOUARD

was used nearly 6.7 million times on Twitter in the 24 h following the attacks of 13 November and #PrayForNice succeeded it in July 2016. Of these hashtags, #JesuisCharlie is still the best known. Created on the day of the January 2015 attacks and based on an illustration posted online by journalist Joachim Roncin, it was used over 3.5 million times on Twitter on the same day. The formula quickly spilled over from social media to become the symbol of national emotion and was used during street demonstrations in support of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo (Bazin 2016). The symbolic weight of the hashtags #PrayForParis and #JeSuisCharlie lay not only in the formulation of an easily reusable slogan (Merzeau 2015), but also in the images that accompanied them (taken from the typography of the satirical weekly for the logo Je suis Charlie in January and in the reappropriation of the pacifist symbol with an image of the Eiffel Tower in November). These forms of push button participation (sharing an image, ‘liking’ it, modifying your profile picture, etc.) joined a culture of ‘expressivism’ online (Allard and Vandenberghe 2003) and partly explain why social media have become one of the main places for reacting when an attack occurs. However, platforms are not mere receptacles for collective emotion: they encourage it and give it shape. This invitation to self-expression can be very explicit, as when Facebook encouraged its users to apply a blue-white-red filter to their profile photo ‘to show (their) support for France and Parisians’ following the terrorist attacks of 13 November. But in general, it is done more implicitly, by providing Internet users with a set of features that allow them to display their feelings (such as the six Facebook ‘Reactions’ emoticons). This formatting of feeling is a cornerstone of the business model of these platforms, one that is based on mechanisms for quantifying emotions and commodifying attention (Alloing and Pierre 2017). If mourning seems in part to escape this market logic, the fact remains that new rituals are emerging on social media, and the design of platforms is closely connected to them (Julliard and Georges 2018).

Plurality of Reactions and Conflicts of Values Faced with the dominant media narrative of national union in times of a terrorist attack, the analysis of reactions on the Internet shows up a wide variety of contrasting opinions. It also questions the idea of a common emotion transcending traditional political divides. Nykos Smyrnaios and Pierre Ratinaud have studied the relationship between reactions to the

5

ON THE INTERNET …

49

attacks and political communities on Twitter during the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015 (Ratinaud and Smyrnaios 2016). By mapping the links between Internet users and using an automatic language processing methodology, they show that the reception of these attacks as media events took place within clear ideological frameworks. Depending on their political leanings, Internet users tend to refer to similar Web sources and they also tend to stress the same consequences of the attacks: these differ whether the individuals are more ‘on the right’ or ‘on the left’. The Internet and social media are also spaces where audiences that are underrepresented in traditional media come together to exchange views and produce types of discourse that go against the mainstream media narratives. I examined the comments made between January and February 2015 by Internet users who expressed online their reluctance to adopt the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’, while strongly condemning the attacks (Badouard 2016). Three main categories of ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’ could be identified on the French Web. The first group was strongly rooted on the left and emphasised how an attempt was being made to instrumentalise for partisan purposes the nationwide outpouring of emotions; this group pointed to the risks that the passing of anti-terrorist security laws would pose to civil liberties. Part of the radical left also criticised Charlie Hebdo for the way it might be legitimising Islamophobia through its cartoons targeting a minority already subject to discrimination. The second group was anchored on the right, sometimes even the extreme right of the political spectrum: while condemning the attacks, these Internet users refused to support a magazine such as Charlie Hebdo, which they perceived as hostile to French traditions and to the values of Catholicism. Finally, the third group comprised ‘ordinary Muslims’ (Göle 2017) who feared an increase in discrimination following the attacks and refused to support an editorial staff perceived as harbouring malicious feelings towards them. The Web is full of arenas in which to publicise counter-discourses that are largely inaudible in other media spaces. But it is also a space for socialisation in which one can put arguments to the test, assess the acceptability of certain positions and engage in contradictory debates. In another study (Badouard 2019), I examined discussions on the Facebook page of Oumma (Umma), the most popular Muslim media platform in France (more than 800,000 ‘likes’ on the social network to date), in the month that followed the attack on Charlie Hebdo. These daily discussions went far beyond the opposition between ‘Charlie’ and ‘not Charlie’ and reflected the great diversity of attitudes and opinions that co-exist

50

R. BADOUARD

among Muslims in France (Geisser et al. 2017, see also chapter 7). By highlighting the themes of discrimination and racism, often linked to a criticism of the media, they could lead both to forms of politicised exchange and to exercises in self-criticism on the part of ‘the community’. Differences and complementarities thus appear between media arenas: on the Web and in traditional media, people do not necessarily talk about the same thing at the same time. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, media temporality seems to distinguish between three moments: the hunt for the Kouachi brothers, national mourning and the underlying social debates. On the Web meanwhile, these three moments are fused, and counter-discourses emerge simultaneously with the construction of a majority narrative. In addition, on the Web, those excluded from the traditional media space can speak out and assert their own interpretation of events, thus correcting the asymmetries of public debate by offering a vision of political exchange that is both inclusive and pluralist (Titley 2017). However, media arenas do not operate in a vacuum: in the same way as on social networks, it is press articles and television news extracts that are shared and debated; online opinion movements are relayed in the media and fuel public controversy.

Attacks and Plots: A Crisis of Rationality? By opening up public space and allowing a ‘liberation of subjectivities’ (Cardon 2010), the Web and social networks have also encouraged the publication of alternative information, produced in ways that often break free from the traditional ethical principles of journalism (Mercier 2019). This openness is reflected, in a period of attack, by the multiplication of unverified information, rumours, conspiracy theories and all kinds of ‘fake news’. While it is difficult to quantify this alternative production and to compare it to a ‘pre-Internet’ era, it seems that the Web and social networks are helping both to accelerate the spread of such items and to ensure their longevity. In a study on conspiracy theories in time of attack, the sociologist Gérald Bronner (2015) notes that the first post-September 11 conspiracy theories were posted online 27 days after the attacks,2 while they appeared the day after the attacks perpetrated by Mohammed Merah 2 Note that social networks did not as yet exist at the time of 9/11, and the Web in the early 2000s did not offer the same facilities for publication as now.

5

ON THE INTERNET …

51

(in 2012) and the Kouachi brothers. In the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Bronner identified some thirty conspiracy theories circulating on the Internet as early as 7 January. There were a hundred or so of them four days later. In addition, on the Internet, this content remains accessible for a longer time, generating dynamics of ‘mutual reinforcement’ between the various conspiracy theories, and directly competing with the information produced by the traditional media. What effects does the spread of conspiracy theories have on the opinions of those who consume them? On this point, there is little agreement: on the one hand, some studies highlight the links between ‘conspiracy theories’ and ‘radicalisation’, in the sense that the majority of radicalised individuals exhibit thought patterns prone to conspiracy theories (Bronner 2015); on the other hand, research in social psychology tends to relativise real adherence to these theories insofar as ‘sharing is not the same as believing’ (Delouvée 2015). The repercussion of rumours in an attack situation thus seems to follow a great diversity of methods (Alloing and Vanderbiest 2018), and Internet users do not necessarily spread them directly, in their own name: those who share them do so most often by embedding them in comments or by accompanying them with questions or critiques. Finally, other studies see these theories as a sign of mistrust of media and intellectual elites. Sharing false information can indeed be akin to the expression of political opinions conveying a certain vision of the world and social relations (Taïeb 2010; Badouard 2017). Analysis of the sociological and psychological profiles of consumers of conspiracy theories also tends to show that they share both a great distrust of traditional media and a strong sense of social marginalisation (Le Caroff and Foulot 2019). Rumours and conspiracy theories are not the only problematic content circulating online in times of a terrorist attack. Incitements to hatred and apologies for terrorism can also be found. During the Charlie Hebdo attack, Internet users used the hashtags #cheh (‘well done’ in Arabic) or #jesuiskouachi to express satisfaction at the attacks. Again, the phenomenon is difficult to quantify, as these hashtags can also be used to denounce those who use them in the first person. Journalist Jean-Marc Manach has shown that in the case of #jesuiskouachi, the hashtag was used about 500 times as a personal opinion, and nearly 49,000 times to express indignation or denunciation. The fact remains that, in the days following the attacks, authorities announced that they had recovered 3,700 tweets that could be prosecuted for defending terrorism.

52

R. BADOUARD

Conclusion This chapter offers only a glimpse of the spectrum of reactions to terrorist attacks on the Internet. We could list others that we have not mentioned, such as the mercantile appropriation of collective emotion (online sale of items bearing the ‘Je suis Nice’ or ‘Je suis Paris’ logos). Messages showing humour and irony (an expressive register particularly used in online discussion spaces) can also act as a safety valve. One thinks here in particular of the #JesuisNico movement in January 2015 (which mocked Nicolas Sarkozy, who had elbowed his way to the front line on the march in support of French republican values), or the appropriation of the interview with Jawad Bendaoud, the ‘landlord of Daesh’, after the 13 November attacks. This diversity of expressive reactions, discourses and registers mobilised online underscores the importance of collecting and archiving such data so as to write a social and cultural history of the attacks (Schafer et al. 2019). In the wake of the 2015 and 2016 attacks, the National Library of France (BNF) and the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) collected such material as a matter of urgency, archiving thousands of sites and millions of tweets. The constraints related to this collecting (such as the impossibility of archiving Facebook) and the choices inherent in the constitution of any corpus (which Twitter hashtags should one record?) will undoubtedly orient the perception that future historians will have of the reception of these events at the heart of society.

References Allard, L., and F. Vandenberghe. 2003. Express Yourself! Les pages perso: entre légitimation technopolitique de l’individualisme expressif et authenticité réflexive peer to peer. Réseaux 117: 191–219. ———, C. Aloing, M. Le Behec, and J. Pierre. 2017. Les affects numériques. Revue française des sciences de l’information et de la communication 11. https://doi.org/10.4000/rfsic.2870. Alloing, C., and J. Pierre. 2017. Le web affectif: une économie numérique des émotions. Bry-sur-Marne: INA Editions. ———, and N. Vanderbiest. 2018. La fabrique des rumeurs numériques: comment la fausse information circule sur Twitter? Le temps des médias 30: 105–123. 2019. Être ou ne pas être “Charlie”: débattre des attentats sur la page Facebook d’un média musulman. Sciences de la société 102: 111–133.

5

ON THE INTERNET …

53

———. 2017. Le désenchantement de l’internet: désinformation, rumeur, propagande. Limoges: FYP Editions. Badouard, R. 2016. “Je ne suis pas Charlie”: pluralité des prises de parole sur le web et les réseaux sociaux. In Le défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats, ed. P. Lefébure and C. Sécail, 187–219. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Bazin, M. 2016. L’énonciation d’un deuil national: usages de “Je suis Charlie” dans les écritures urbaines. In Le défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats, ed. P. Lefébure and C. Sécail, 153–186. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Berube, M., T.-H. Tang, F. Fortin, S. Ozalp, M.L. Williams, and O. Burnap. 2020. Social Media Forensics Applied to Assessment of Post-critical Incident Social Reaction: The Case of the 2017 Manchester Arena Terrorist Attack. Forensic Science International 313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsci int.2020.110364. Bronner, G. 2015. Pourquoi les théories du complot se portent-elles si bien? L’exemple de Charlie Hebdo. Diogène 249–250: 9–20. Burnap, P., M. L. Williams, L. Sloan, O. Rana, W. Housley, A. Edwards, V. Knight, R. Procter, and A. Vox. 2014. Tweeting the Terror: Modelling the Social Media Reaction to the Woolwich Terrorist Attack. Social Network Analysis and Mining 4 (206). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-014-0206-4. Cardon, D. 2010. La démocratie internet: promesses et limites. Paris: Le Seuil. Delouvée, S. 2015. Répéter n’est pas croire: sur la transmissions des idées conspirationnistes. Diogène 49–250: 88–98. Eriksson Krutök, M., and S. Lindgren. 2018. Continued Contexts of Terror: Analyzing Temporal Patterns of Hashtag Co-Occurrence as Discursive Articulations. Social Media + Society 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.1177/205630511 8813649. Fraser, N. 2011. Qu’est-ce que la justice sociale? Reconnaissance et redistribution. Paris: La Découverte. Garcia, D., and B. Rimé. 2019. Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack. Psychological Science 30 (4): 617–628. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619831964. Geisser, V., O. Marongiu-Perria, and K. Smaïl. 2017. Musulmans de France, la grande épreuve. Ivry-sur-Seine: Les éditions de l’atelier. Göle, N. 2017. The Daily Lives of Muslims: Islam and Public Confrontation in Contemporary Europe. London: Zed Books. Innes, M., C. Roberts, A. Preece, and D. Rogers. 2018. Ten ‘Rs’ of Social Reaction: Using Social Media to Analyse the ‘Post-event’ Impacts of the Murder of Lee Rigby. Terrorism and Political Violence 30 (3): 454–474. https://doi. org/10.1080/09546553.2016.1180289. Jouan, M. 2017. Politique du deuil: entre reconnaissance et invisibilisation. Réfléchir avec Judith Butler sur le deuil public après les attentats du 13 novembre 2015. Raison Publique 21: 113–152.

54

R. BADOUARD

Julliard, V., and F. Georges. 2018. Produire le mort: pratiques d’écriture et travail émotionnel des deuilleurs et des deuilleuses sur Facebook. Réseaux 210: 89– 116. Le Caroff, C., and M. Foulot. 2019. L’adhésion au “complotisme” saisie à partir du commentaire sur Facebook. Questions De Communication 35: 255–279. Mercier, A. 2019. La lecture événementielle des faits politiques: entre logiques journalistiques et (dés)intermédiation numérique. Sciences de la société 102: 32–51. Merzeau, L. 2015. ‘#jesuisCharlie, ou le médium identité’, Médium: Transmettre pour innover, Ed. Babylone, 33–46. Oksanen, A., M. Kaakinen, J. Minkkinen, P. Räsänen, B. Enjolras, and K. SteenJohnsen. 2020. Perceived Societal Fear and Cyberhate after the November 2015 Paris Terrorist Attacks. Terrorism and Political Violence 32 (5): 1047– 1066. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2018.1442329. Ratinaud, P., and N. Smyrnaios. 2016. The Web Sphere of #CharlieHebdo: A Network and Discours Analysis of a Political Controversy on Twitter. ESSACHESS Journal for Communication Studies 9 (2): 213–230. Schafer, V., G. Truc, R. Badouard, L. Castex, and F. Musiani. 2019. Paris and Nice terrorist attacks: Exploring Twitter and Web Archives. Media, War & Conflict 12 (2): 153–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635219839382. Taïeb, E. 2010. Logiques politiques du complotisme. Sociologie et sociétés 42 (2): 265–289. Titley, G. 2017. Becoming Symbolic: From Charlie Hebdo to ‘Charlie Hebdo.’ In After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech, ed. G. Titley, D. Freedman, G. Khiabany, and A. Mondon, 1–27. London: Zed Books. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks. Trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. _____. 2020. Le 13-Novembre sur Twitter: de l’information à la compassion. La Revue des Médias. https://larevuedesmedias.ina.fr/13-novembre-attentats-twi tter-hashtags-reaction. ———. C. Le Bart, and E. Née. 2018. ‘L’attentat comme objet de discours: Problématique et enjeux’. Mots: Les langages du politique, n°118, 9–18. Vanderbiest, N. 2016. Les six phases d’un attentat sur les réseaux sociaux: le cas de Nice. ReputatioLab. http://www.reputatiolab.com/2016/07/6-pha ses-dun-attentat-reseaux-sociaux-cas-de-nice/.

CHAPTER 6

In the Schools: Bringing Pupils into the National Community of Mourning Sébastien Ledoux

Abstract Minutes of silence in tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks were organised in all French schools in January and in November 2015. Based on interviews with teachers, school professionals, pupils and officials at the Ministry of Education, this chapter examines the implementation of this political decision in different schools in the Paris region. Sébastien Ledoux analyses how schools grapple with two contradictory injunctions. Since the end of the nineteenth century, the educational institution in France is given a key role in the construction of national identity (through a ‘national education’), but it is also expected to teach pupils about democracy and democratic institutions. Keywords French Schools · Minutes of silence · National community · Terrorist attacks · Mourning rituals

S. Ledoux (B) Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre d’histoire sociale des mondes contemporains, Paris, France

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_6

55

56

S. LEDOUX

Minutes of silence in tribute to the victims of the terrorist attacks were organised in French schools in January and in November 2015. Although the ritual had already been observed in the past, it seems to have crystallised tensions. Indeed, the school system was confronted simultaneously by two contradictory injunctions: one relating to its historical role in the construction of national identity and the other relating to the part it plays in teaching pupils about democracy and democratic institutions. This dramatic situation highlighted the specific nature of the organisation of the educational institution in France and the role ascribed to it since the end of the nineteenth century: to provide young people with a ‘national education’ (éducation nationale—the current title of the relevant ministry since 1930’s). This formulation defines both a civic purpose—education for the nation, in particular through the sharing of its values—and a very centralised organisation of the institution based in Paris, with programmes and exams that are identical throughout the national territory. In the hours following the Charlie Hebdo attack on Wednesday 7 January 2015, the President of the Republic, François Hollande decided that a minute of silence would be observed in France the next day, including in all schools, from kindergarten to high school. This was part of the larger framework of a day of national mourning and it was assigned a twofold function by the Head of State, when he addressed French people in a primetime televised address on the evening of 7 January. First, it involved participating in a ritual of mourning: it was to be a ‘moment of reflection’ in tribute to ‘our heroes’, who had ‘died for the idea they had of France, that is to say, freedom’. Second, it was meant to demonstrate physically the unity of the nation: the ‘gathering together’ of all ‘fellow citizens facing this ordeal’ could be a means to defeat ‘the enemy’. The president declared: ‘Our best weapon is our unity, the unity of all our fellow citizens in the face of this ordeal […] France has always conquered its enemies precisely when it has been able to come together around its values. This is what I invite you to do’. His address thus framed the event as something in which the whole Nation was involved (Boussaguet and Faucher 2018).

The Ritual of the Minute’s Silence in Schools: A Long History The request that a minute of silence be observed in all schools in the aftermath of a terrorist act was nothing new. This practice was initiated to pay tribute to the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks in the

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

57

United States, and it was repeated after the 11 March 2004 attacks in Madrid (Truc 2017). The decision taken on the afternoon of Wednesday 7 January de facto identified the Charlie Hebdo massacre as a terrorist attack committed by Islamists against the West. While minutes of silence had been observed locally, in Toulouse and its region in March 2012 in tribute to the victims of Mohamed Merah, the decision to involve all schools in a similar act of homage for the victims of Charlie Hebdo highlighted the role attributed to them for national cohesion. It identified them with the place where a community of values and of mourning could be best demonstrated, and where an emotional closeness to the victims could be experienced. It implicitly acknowledged the French tradition of assigning to the educational institution the task of developing in pupils a sense of attachment and belonging to the Nation. It assumed that the ritual would contribute to constructing and guaranteeing national unity. Beyond the recent configuration that links it to jihadist attacks, the observance of a minute of silence is part of a much longer tradition. It appeared during the 1920s on the occasion of the 11 November commemorations in tribute to the soldiers who died in the First World War. It was then observed in front of the local war memorial, in the presence of pupils and teachers (Dancel 2002; Saint-Fuscien 2017). By attending this national ritual, children participated in a community of mourning that metaphorically figured the community of the nation paying homage to those who had sacrificed themselves so that it could continue to live. This ritual was maintained in schools after 1945 and henceforth included a tribute to the heroes of the resistance. At the end of the twentieth century, minutes of silence were regularly observed during educational trips organised to places of deportation and extermination during the Second World War. In such occasions, pupils were sometimes asked to pay homage not only to the heroes who had sacrificed themselves in the defence of the nation but also to the Jewish victims exterminated in the context of the genocide committed by the Nazis. Rejection of anti-Semitism and adherence to the values of human rights were thus integrated in the ritual (Ledoux 2016). The minutes of silence instituted within French schools on 8 January and 16 November 2015 condensed these various legacies. While updating the symbolic gathering of the nation around its ‘heroes’, they also included a homage to the victims and the defence of the national values they embodied (freedom of the press, freedom of speech, being able to live together). In order to assess the diversity of situations faced

58

S. LEDOUX

by the people involved in the world of education, I conducted 102 interviews, between 2017 and 2020, with various stakeholders in the education sector in the Paris region (minister, ministerial advisers, primary and secondary school heads, teachers, nurses and school social workers, librarians, students).1

January 2015: The Preparation for the Minute’s Silence After the Charlie Hebdo Attacks Education and Research Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and her advisers learned about the shooting at the Charlie Hebdo offices via social media during a meeting at the ministry. A crisis unit was immediately set up by the chief of staff to organise a lockdown in schools near the headquarters of the weekly magazine. During the afternoon, the cabinet of the ministry was informed of the presidential decision to organise a minute’s silence in all French schools on the following day. Once the initial shock and panic had passed, and as information arrived about the identity of the perpetrators, the political adviser to the minister alerted her to the fact that the education system would most likely be the focus of a general debate across society, if only because the two perpetrators, and their victims, had been educated in France. While everyone within the cabinet approved the decision to observe a minute’s silence, they were aware from the start that this was a sensitive subject. They anticipated that there would be difficulties in applying it in some schools because of the connection with the caricatures of the Muslim prophet. The department of education issued a press release in the evening. It ‘asked all staff and pupils to observe, at noon on Thursday 8 January, a minute’s silence in tribute to the victims of the attack that occurred on 7 January in Paris.’ Simultaneously, the minister accompanied this official request with a letter addressed to teachers, in which she labelled the event as a ‘murderous attack’, perpetrated against ‘the weekly Charlie Hebdo’, and as ‘an assault on our Republic at its very heart’, targeting ‘the essential values of our Republic: freedom of speech.’ Noting how the role of education is ‘to transmit the fundamental values of freedom, equality, fraternity, and secularism’, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem indicated that the minute of silence would be ‘a time when our country manifests its

1 These interviews are archived at the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA).

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

59

national unity in the face of an ordeal’. She highlighted that at this time the educational institution needed ‘to support the ideals of the Republic.’ The words used in the request sent to staff and pupils had been carefully crafted to make the injunction to observe a minute’s silence heavily symbolic. It was written within a specific context: first, the publication of a Charter of Secularism in September 2013; second, the creation of a Secularism Day—celebrated for the first time on 9 December 2014; and third, the passing of a law re-founding the school system (law of 8 July 2013), which named the transmission of republican values and the implementation of a secularist pedagogy among the priorities of the ministry. All of the minister’s advisers referred to this very specific situation in my interviews with them. When the Charlie Hebdo attack occurred, therefore, the senior administration was already strongly mobilised on the issue of republican values, in particular secularism. For the members of the ministerial cabinet, this attack thus merely reinforced the need to conduct a policy centred on the transmission of these values. From Thursday 8 January, several advisers worked on a School Mobilisation Plan for the values of the Republic that was presented by the minister to the media on 22 January. When the injunction to observe silence as part of a mourning ritual was addressed to staff and pupils, it was accompanied by a request for proper attention to be paid to what the pupils themselves had to say. In her letter to teachers, the Education Minister added an indication that was no longer political in import, but educational. This time, it was a question of inviting teachers ‘to respond favourably to the needs or requests for expression that may take place in class.’ This consideration of the needs and expressions of pupils became a central element of institutional discourse in the aftermath of the attacks of 13 November 2015.2 Even if it appeared marginal in January 2015, documents posted on the website of the ministry in the days following 7 January linked such attention to pupils’ needs to several recent and multidisciplinary scientific research projects (in sociology, psychology and the neurosciences). These had analysed emotional and cognitive processes involved in learning and the role of empathy in interactions between pupils, as well as the school environment. The results of the research had highlighted the need 2 ‘Savoir accueillir la parole des élèves après un attentat’, text uploaded on 14 November 2015 on the website of the Ministry, https://eduscol.education.fr/969/savoir-accueillirla-parole-des-eleves-apres-un-attentat, accessed on 7 July 2021.

60

S. LEDOUX

to take into account the feelings of pupils and the expression of their emotions in their school careers in general, and in particular when faced with highly publicised violent events. For example, a few days after the attack the ministry put online a text co-signed by psychologists and Eric Debarbieux, a researcher in educational sciences specialising in school violence. The text warned that ‘for a child or a teenager, having to face an event like that of the terrorist attack against the journal Charlie Hebdo, even indirectly via different media, can assume a traumatic character.’3 So, the categorisation of the attack as potentially traumatic for pupils because of its media coverage entered the discourse of the educational institution in January 2015. The Ministry and the General Directorate of School Education worked urgently to post resources on the eduscol portal. However, the first document (‘Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech: educational tools for thinking and discussing with pupils’) was only published online at 8 p.m. on Thursday 8 January, in other words after the minute’s silence had been observed. Hence, teachers had to rely on their own resources to organise this ritual with their pupils.

January 2015: The Minute’s Silence as a Subject of Disagreement While few of the teachers I interviewed were aware of the minister’s letter, they did follow the media coverage for much of the afternoon and evening. The idea of an attack on the nation was also omnipresent in the media discourse (Bazin 2018). However, most of the teachers I interviewed emphasised their attachment to freedom of speech and considered that its importance needed to be explained and discussed in class. In fact, they did not necessarily subscribe to the way the state and the media had interpreted the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo journalists. They recalled that the minute of silence, that had been requested the day before, created an unusual suspension of ordinary class time for the pupils and their teacher(s) and had to be organised at very short notice. For the staff concerned, this meant responding to a diversity of challenging questions. These were not only practical (when to do it? where? with whom?) but also pedagogical (whether or not to allow pupils to address the class? how 3 ‘Quelques considérations pour aborder la médiatisation d’un évènement collectif violent avec les élèves’. https://cache.media.eduscol.education.fr/file/ecole/96/5/abo rder_evenement_collectif_violent_383965.pdf. Accessed on October 2021.

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

61

to tell pupils what had happened and what was at stake? what documents to use?), educational (how to explain the minute’s silence?) and personal (teachers were still in a state of shock after the attack). The answers to these questions were extremely varied, depending on the local situation. As a consequence, the demonstration of national unity that the Head of State wanted to create by asking schools and public services to come to a standstill at the same time (at noon) across the whole country came up against complex but practical considerations in individual schools. For example, in many junior schools, the prescribed time for the minute of silence fell during the lunch break when pupils were in the dining hall, without their teachers. This mismatch between a symbolic political action meant to be unifying and the constraints of real-life situations sometimes led school heads to hold this moment of reflection an hour before the scheduled time. In addition, every school head had questions about the modalities of this minute of silence and how much room for manoeuvre was left to the teachers. Were they under any obligation to observe it or was this left to their discretion? Should it be observed within classrooms or in a gathering place such as the school yard? This latter option had the advantage of symbolically staging the unity of the nation at the school level but there were also concerns about how the pupils would react to such a situation. Such considerations effectively guided the practical decisions that were implemented within each school. In some cases, teachers were anxious about finding themselves alone to lead the ritual and, as a consequence, they were opposed to holding a minute of silence in individual classrooms. Instead, they proposed doing it in the school yard in the presence of their colleagues and the school management, and therefore in what they considered a reassuring collective setting. Conversely, in other cases, the management staff decided to organise the minute of silence within classrooms so as to avoid group effects. They considered that the risk of disruption of the minute of silence would thus be reduced and thereby that the institutional request for unity was more likely to be fulfilled. The teachers I interviewed pointed to several elements which came into play in the preparation and the application of the procedure: their subjective experience of the event, their seniority—in terms of their profession and their school, the formal framework of the moment of reflection decided by their management and the anticipation of pupils’ reactions. Without necessarily being readers of Charlie Hebdo, some

62

S. LEDOUX

teachers expressed a feeling of great closeness to some of the victims: the cartoonist Cabu reminded them of their childhood, when he was a contributor to a famous children’s TV programme; teachers in the economic and social sciences were also familiar with Bernard Marris, an economist and radio chronicler on France Inter, the main public radio station. The emotion was intense in many school staff rooms on the Thursday morning when the teachers met and talked about their amazement, their indignation, their dismay and their sadness. For some of those who worked in disadvantaged schools, this emotion was put to the test by some of their pupils who showed indifference towards the victims or by others who expressed their support for the perpetrators of the attack. However, at the other end of the spectrum of pupil reactions, teachers were surprised by the fact that some pupils spontaneously struck up the Marseillaise at the end of the minute of silence. This was reported in several schools with socially advantaged or mixed intakes. Pupils asked their teachers to make time for discussion and to grant them permission to express themselves. This was mentioned by a number of teachers of history and geography classes in high schools, and the insistence was all the stronger when they had not been able to talk about it with other teachers in other subjects. These requests demonstrated a need for the exchange of ideas and arguments in the context of debates. They also expressed the wish to test out, in the collective experience of the class, whether the emotions felt were in harmony with those of others (their peers, their teacher). Moreover, they showed an aspiration to resolve, through discussion, contradictory emotions about which they sometimes felt quite uncertain.4 Thus, the debates in class divided the pupils: some expressed indignation at the serious attack on freedom of speech and the Republic, on the one hand, and others considered that the journalists of Charlie Hebdo had taken the risk of being killed by caricaturing the prophet of the Muslim religion. The ritual of the minute of silence was meant to establish an equivalence between the community of mourning and the national community. In the French school system, it created a moment when borders between cultural and political affiliations, between ‘them’ and ‘us’, became tangible. This crystallisation was reinforced in the following days by the media coverage of the ‘incidents’ (the term used by the Ministry 4 On the role of discussion to adjust collective emotions in this kind of situations, see Truc (2020).

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

63

of National Education) caused by pupils during or around the minute’s silence of 8 January 2015. Indeed, these incidents were the object of intense political and media controversies for several weeks and led, among other things, to the drafting of a senate report entitled ‘Bringing the Republic back into schools.’ Such vigorous debates are characteristic of the period that American sociologist Randall Collins calls a ‘zone of hysteria’ during which political and media debates are heightened. He argues that patriotism and social cohesion are constantly reaffirmed to the point that everyone is called upon to express their solidarity with the victims; failure to do so leads to being suspected of sympathy with terrorists and thus of being labelled as internal enemies (Collins 2004). However, the class debates organised by teachers showed that the difficulty partly lay in the slogan Je suis Charlie (‘I am Charlie’) that, from 8 January onwards, imposed itself as the combined and inseparable manifestation of closeness to the victims on the one hand and support for the journal’s drawings on the other. For some pupils, the request to observe the minute of silence did not amount to solidarity with murdered people or the defence of freedom of speech; rather, it was a request to express support for the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that had shocked them. National education personnel sometimes had to clearly differentiate between the community of mourning and the community of national education: their work, on 8 January and in the days and weeks that followed, consisted in reintroducing into the school community the pupils who had spontaneously expressed their non-membership in the mourning community.

After 13 November 2015: An Educational Community United in Mourning The reactions to the attacks of 13 November 2015 appear to have been much more homogeneous. They conveyed the image of a school community united in emotions that, this time, were shared: fear, sadness and indignation. The indiscriminate attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis breached the sense of security of a wider circle of the French population than the targeted attacks of January 2015 had. Members of the education system were also among the victims of 13 November: one female high school pupil and eight teachers lost their lives in these attacks (SaintFuscien 2020). The emotional reconfigurations at work among pupils bore witness to these effects. In the days that followed, educational

64

S. LEDOUX

staff sought to reassure pupils who felt in danger and feared for themselves or their families. This sentiment may have been amplified by the language circulating in the media (Lefébure et al. 2018) and by the state authorities who, the day after the attacks, proposed interpreting then in a ‘war’ framework. This framing had repercussions on pupils’ feelings of insecurity. As for the educational institution, the email from the Minister of Education sent to the teachers’ professional mailbox on Saturday 14 November significantly used an emotional vocabulary that had been absent in January: ‘The terrorist attacks that struck Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis on Friday 13 November once again reached into the heart of our Republic and filled all of us with dismay.’ The emphasis this time was not on the defence of the Republic through the promotion of the values that embodied it, but on listening to pupils and on the importance of dialogue with them. Entitled ‘Listening carefully to the words of pupils after the terrorist attacks in Île-de-France’, the resource document produced by the education department and posted on the department of education’s webpage (eduscol.education.fr) on the Saturday evening was explicitly mentioned in the minister’s letter. It indicated the role and the competence expected from the teacher, focusing on paying attention to the pupils’ emotions: ‘This dialogue is an essential pedagogical work to support children and teenagers in the management of their emotions and the complete understanding of these violent events.’ At the local level, our survey sheds light on the differences in the emotions felt by pupils from working-class immigrant backgrounds in January and then November 2015. These pupils voiced emotions dominated by fear and indignation, which reflected not only their feelings of closeness to the victims but also a process of identification with those who had been attacked, in particular in the case of the attacks targeting the Stade de France in Saint-Denis during a football match. This identification could take very vivid forms. In several vocational high schools, pupils in tears told their teacher that some family members had been injured in the attacks, which later turned out to be untrue. The question of being ‘concerned’ (Truc 2017) by the attacks was here felt not only in a sense of solidarity or closeness with the victims but in a strong feeling of vulnerability projected onto one’s own life or that of one’s relatives (families, friends). Pupils in schools from working-class immigrant backgrounds felt concerned by the 13 November attacks because they identified with the victims and because they now also saw themselves as potential targets for terrorists.

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

65

The reconfiguration that made this different from January was sometimes viewed as reassuring by education staff. A minute of silence was observed on Monday 16 November. In some schools, it served also the function of a ritual of reparation vis-à-vis that of January, in the sense that this time it allowed the expression of an emotional communion between adults on the one hand and pupils on the other—a communion that had been absent on 8 January 2015. In November 2015, all members of the school community observed the ritual of mourning and thereby participated in the constitution of a grieving community. However, the forcefully expressed fear called into question the role of the State as the guarantor of citizens’ security. While a common emotion was displayed in the school environment, it was partly built on a strong feeling of individual insecurity, which was further reinforced when Daesh published threats of attacks directed at schools a few days later. The department of education and schools immediately mobilised to ensure the security of staff and pupils: they scaled up the levels of protection of schools and introduced a new exercise, conceived to prepare against attack or intrusion, in the security protocol PPMS (Plan particulier de Mise en Sûreté or Individual security plan). This exercise has been carried out once a year since the start of the 2016 autumn term in each French school and it now involves everyone in the educational system. Moreover, the department and the school sector have developed a culture aimed at preventing the risk of terrorism.

The Murder of Samuel Paty: When Teachers Become Targets for Terrorists The beheading of a history and geography teacher on 16 October 2020 by an Islamist terrorist dramatically revived the tensions that had appeared in the school system in January 2015. In a class dedicated to moral and civic education (Enseignement moral et civique), and in order to open a discussion about freedom of expression and freedom of the press, Samuel Paty had shown caricatures of the Muslim prophet that had been published in Charlie Hebdo. The initiative had angered a school parent who, encouraged by a radical cleric, used social media to express his frustration, thereby providing a target to the would-be murderer. The assassination of a history and geography teacher in relation to the content covered in class underlined the preeminent place played by teachers of this subject in the institutional response to terrorist attacks since 2015.

66

S. LEDOUX

Indeed, the topics of freedom of speech and secularism had in fact been included in the development of a new curriculum on civic education, traditionally taught by history teachers. The interviews I conducted with some of them in the weeks following this new attack showed the teachers’ deep dismay. The organisation of a minute of silence in tribute to Samuel Paty on 2 November 2020, at the request of the ministry, reactivated in some schools the mismatch between the community of mourning and the educational community. Once again, teachers organised class discussions, with contradictory debates between pupils in line with the national education’s mission of teaching about democracy, citizenship and the Republic. At the same time, this terrorist act created a new ‘zone of hysteria’, with exacerbated political debates in the French media. For instance, a week after the assassination, the Minister of National Education denounced Islamo-leftism (Islamo-gauchisme) as wreaking havoc in universities and for its ‘intellectual complicity with terrorism’. A few months later, in February 2021, the Minister of Higher Education and Research launched an ‘investigation’ into the extent to which Islamo-leftism ‘plague[d]’ the university. These political declarations emanating from two Ministers of Education did little to address the difficulties experienced by teachers when dealing with freedom of speech and secularism in their classes. Faced with the repetition of Islamist attacks, the French educational world appears to be imbued with tensions and subject to contradictory injunctions: it is supposed on the one hand to contribute to the construction of an immediate and ephemeral national community of mourning, and on the other hand to form citizens through democratic practices which include the practice of debates.

References Bazin, M. 2018. Peuples en larmes, peuples en marches: la médiatisation des affects lors des attentats de janvier 2015. Mots. Les langages du politique 118: 75–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23653. Boussaguet, L., and F. Faucher. 2018. La construction des discours présidentiels post-attentats à l’épreuve du temps. Mots. Les langages du politique 118: 95– 115. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23867. Collins, R. 2004. Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist Attack. Sociological Theory 22 (1): 53–87.

6

IN THE SCHOOLS: BRINGING PUPILS INTO THE NATIONAL …

67

Dancel, B. 2002. Enseigner l’histoire de la grande guerre et commémorer l’armistice du 11 novembre à l’école primaire. Carrefours de l’éducation 13: 18–49. Ledoux, S. 2016. Le Devoir de mémoire: une formule et son histoire. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Lefébure, P., É. Roche, and C. Sécail. 2018. Les attentats du 13 novembre en direct à la télévision: mise en récit de l’événement et de ses ramifications. Mots. Les langages du politique 118: 37–57. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots. 23766. Saint-Fuscien, E. 2017. “Enfants, sauvez les tombes de nos morts”: deuil de guerre et mondes scolaires (1914–1939). Cahiers Jaurès 225: 65–87. https:// doi.org/10.3917/cj.225.0065. ———. 2020. Au-delà de la minute de silence? L’hommage aux morts des attentats de 2015 en milieu scolair. Sensibilités 8: 78–88. https://doi.org/10. 3917/sensi.008.0078. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks, trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2020. Tous concernés? La dimension collective des émotions en situation d’attentats. In Les émotions collectives, ed. L. Kaufmann and L. Quéré, 97–131. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.

CHAPTER 7

French Muslims: A Silent Community? Vincent Geisser

Abstract The thesis of a so-called ‘Muslim silence’ prevailed in the French public space after the 2015 attacks although prayers for ‘the protection of France’ were organised in a number of mosques, and even though many French Muslims posted on social networks messages of solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attacks. This chapter argues that, in response to the attacks, French Muslims developed a form of symbiosis between republican values and religious rituals, and asserted a desire to reconcile ‘Islamicness’ and French citizenship. These efforts contributed to the development of a unique version of Islamo-patriotism. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates that the diversity of French Muslim reactions to terrorist attacks reflected the social, territorial and generational splits in the French population.

V. Geisser (B) CNRS, Institut de Recherches et d’Études sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans, Aix-en-Provence, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_7

69

70

V. GEISSER

Keywords Muslims · Islamicness · Jihadism (counter-discourse against) · French citizenship · Republican values · Terrorist attacks · Islamophobia

The reactions of French Muslims to the attacks that have struck France since 2015 constitute a blind spot for many commentators. Indeed, editorial writers and politicians conveyed the image of a ‘silent community’. Some of them invited the Muslims in France to publicly condemn terrorist acts, as if they were incapable of doing so by themselves. Not only were such views based on normative presuppositions—Muslims are deemed to be not sufficiently attached to the principles and values of the nation—but these assertions were not either supported by precise facts. In a way, the Muslims of France have been rendered invisible as citizens in the demonstrations of mourning and the mobilisations that followed the attacks, and this is connected to the double-bind injunction addressed to them: to explicitly dissociate themselves from the terrorists as ‘Muslims’ (in a particularist register) while, at the same time, ‘blending in’ with French society (in a universalist register). The aim of this chapter is to deconstruct the idea of a ‘silence’ in the face of Islamist terrorism. To do so, I analyse the different positions, actions and mobilisations of Muslim organisations and personalities in France between January 2015 and October 2020 (so as to include the murder of the high-school teacher Samuel Paty and the attack on a church in Nice). I take these attacks as moments that reveal the ways in which ‘Islamicness’1 and French citizenship are linked in the public space. In a sense, the terrorist crisis creates an opportunity for the sociologist to observe ‘French Muslim scenes’, unfolding in many different places, registers and temporalities. The ‘commemorative polysemy’ (Mauger 2015, p. 88) that appears then is a characteristic shared by French citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims. There is no such thing as a ‘Muslim way’ (Roy 2015) of mourning or of mobilising against Islamist terrorism, but different mechanisms and modes of doing so that depend on local, even micro-local contexts (cities, neighbourhoods, municipalities, etc.) and on the social, educational and religious trajectories of individuals and groups.

1 We use this notion of ‘Islamicness’ (islamité) drawing on the term ‘Jewishness’ (judéité), referring to the different ways of being, living as and feeling oneself to be Jewish, outside of any religious belief or practice (Schnapper et al. 2009).

7

FRENCH MUSLIMS: A SILENT COMMUNITY?

71

A terrorist attack is a social trauma. It revives ‘one of the founding questions of sociology, that of the relationship between individuals and groups, and of the mechanisms of solidarity in modern societies’ (Truc 2017, p. 4). If the attacks that France has experienced since 2015 have not called into question the cultural, socioeconomic and political integration of Muslims into French society, this integration has nevertheless been debated in the public sphere, thereby maintaining doubts about their loyalty to the national community. Muslims have constantly been called upon to express their opinion on the depth of their adherence to the principles and values of ‘secular and republican France’. Although they have rarely been accused by politicians or by the media of being guilty of terrorist attacks or accomplices of the terrorists, Muslim organisations and leaders have sometimes been presented as morally responsible for the radical excesses of certain members of ‘their’ community, or have been suspected of separatist tendencies that may lead to jihadist violence (Geisser 2020). The analysis presented here is based on a series of semi-structured interviews carried out between September 2015 and April 2017 with forty Muslim leaders and spokespersons in France, but also with some thirty ‘ordinary Muslims’, most of them living in Ile-de-France, Normandy and the South of France. Community websites (Oumma.com, Saphirnews, Al Kanz.org, Halalbook.fr, Ajib.fr, islamophobie.net, etc.), blogs, personal and community pages on Facebook and forums and press releases published in the regional and national press by prominent or anonymous Muslims were also monitored and analysed. A qualitative survey on the way young French Muslims relate to the Prophet Muhammad was administered in 2018–2019, as part of a research programme (ANRDFG Prophet ). Questions focused on their reactions to the publications of cartoons and on the terrorist acts carried out explicitly in ‘revenge for the honour of the Prophet’. Finally, we attended and observed many local and national events organised by Muslim associations and mosques relating to the themes of ‘radicalisation’, ‘terrorism’, ‘solidarity with the victims’ and ‘interreligious dialogue’ (Geisser et al. 2016).

Tribute, Voice and Loyalty: Reassuring the National Community Faced with the Islamist attacks, French Muslims, both as individuals and as collectives, are regularly confronted with a paradoxical injunction. They are asked to condemn violence in a universalist register, attesting to their

72

V. GEISSER

mastery of the republican political lexicon, while also expected to accept as their own a particularist discourse that rejects Islamist terrorism ‘in the name of Islam’. This twofold constraint favours a form of discursive alchemy where the proclaimed adherence to republican and secular values is combined with doctrinal and theological references aimed at religiously delegitimising any recourse to violence. Despite their quarrel with the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo over the regular publication of cartoons deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad, almost all Muslim institutions and organisations in France unambiguously condemned the attack on the paper’s editorial staff on 7 January 2015 and clearly called on ‘citizens of Muslim faith to join the national and republican demonstration of Sunday 11 January 2015 in large numbers so as to affirm their desire to live together in peace and show respect for the values of the Republic’.2 A few days later, the French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM) joined with independent Muslim federations and the main mosques in France: they invited ‘the imams of France, on the occasion of next Friday’s sermon, to recall in unity the essence of the Qur’anic message and its universal and humanist values’.3 These calls were widely relayed at the local level by Muslim associations, religious figures and mosques, so as to reach ordinary believers and practitioners. The sociologist Warda Hadjab, who carried out a participant observation during the great ‘Republican March’ of 11 January 2015, noted that many anonymous Muslims, not affiliated with organisations or mosques, attended this march, thus contradicting the thesis that there was a Muslim boycott of it (Hadjab 2015). However, the attacks of 13 November 2015 caused a profound shock to people’s sense of citizenship and spiritual identity, prompting Muslims in France to mobilise more against terrorism and to make their participation in the mourning community more visible. The magnitude of the event (130 dead and 413 wounded), the diversity of the social origins of the victims and the multicultural character of the places targeted by the terrorists (a concert hall, cafes and restaurants, the Stade de France, etc.) led Muslims in France to identify more intensely with the victims and to publicly state their participation in the mourning community. From 2 CFCM (French Council for Muslim Worship), press release of 8 January 2015. This text was signed by all the Muslim federations of France, including the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF), though the latter has withdrawn from the CFCM. 3 CFCM, press release dated 14 January 2015.

7

FRENCH MUSLIMS: A SILENT COMMUNITY?

73

14 November, the main Muslim federations launched a call for unity and national mourning: ‘Muslim federations call on all mosques in France and all the faithful to raise prayers for peace in our country and the safety of our fellow citizens. May Allah protect our country France from all misfortune’.4 Fortnight days later, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris organised an event that brought together more than 300 national and local Islamic leaders from France. The staging, the bodily postures of those who attended and the content of the speeches evoked the great patriotic ‘masses’ (in the sense of Catholic services) of the Third Republic, when the sacred was expressed in a twofold register, both profane and religious. There were also explicit references to a civic Islam (Sèze 2015): We, Muslims of France, affirm our deep attachment to the republican pact and to the universal values which found our Republic as well as our attachment to the principle of secularism, which guarantees freedom of conscience and respect for the diversity of religious convictions and practices. […] In the name of the Muslims of France, we raise our prayers so that France may live happy and prosperous, and may be strong and great through union and harmony; may the Most Merciful help and protect France and the French people. (Citizen Manifesto of Muslims in France, adopted on 29 November 2015)

The mobilisation of Muslims against terrorism reached new levels in the summer of 2016, following the attack in Nice on 14 July 2016— a national holiday—which left 86 dead and 458 wounded. The event triggered an outpour of anti-terrorist language: community leaders, and some ordinary Muslims, expressed their shock more publicly and explicitly than after previous attacks. At the local level, an increased number of Muslim representatives of all persuasions, from the most liberal to the most conservative, called their brethren to demonstrate, to pay tribute to the victims and to provide assistance to the wounded. They asked for blood donations—a powerful symbolic act. On 17 July 2016, a delegation of imams from the Nice region visited families who had lost loved ones in the 14 July attack.5 The large number of Muslims among the victims of 4 Call for unity and national mourning by Muslim federations, Saphirnews, November 14, 2015. https://www.saphirnews.com/L-appel-al-unite-et-au-deuil-national-des-federa tions-muslim_a21538.html. Accessed on 12 December 2015. 5 Source: http://www.umam06.com/actualites/2016/17-06-2016-visite-des-famillesendeuillees.html. Accessed October 2021.

74

V. GEISSER

the Nice attack (30 out of 84 deaths)6 may have contributed to a process of identification with the mourning community and may have naturalised demands for a civil and patriotic Islam, rejecting all forms of political and religious violence (Charrihi 2017). A few days later, on 26 July, two young French jihadists assassinated an 86-year-old Catholic priest, Jacques Hamel, who was leading a service in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray (Seine-Maritime). On this occasion, the French Council for Muslim Worship and local associations (such as the Rouen Union of Muslims) solemnly called on Muslims to attend mass on Sunday in order to express their solidarity with members of the Catholic community. This initiative, unprecedented in the history of Islam in France, also mobilised ordinary Muslims, although there are no precise figures on the extent of their participation. Our survey, carried out in several churches in France, confirmed the presence of imams and community elites (presidents of associations, notables and local elected officials of Muslim faith) at Sunday Mass on 31 July 2016 as well as of ordinary Muslim believers who had come to testify their solidarity with the Catholics of France and their rejection of terrorism committed ‘in the name of Islam’. In October 2020, after the murder of Samuel Paty, a history and geography schoolteacher in the Paris region, national federations and local associations, and anonymous Muslims expressed their dismay at the atrocity of the modus operandi (decapitation of the victim). They expressed shock about an attack on a teacher, a symbol of state education, freedom of expression and ‘living together’. The majority of Muslim federations and personalities participated in demonstrations of republican homage to Samuel Paty despite the polemical comments made by the Minister of the Interior. In effect, Gérald Darmanin attributed the moral responsibility for the terrorist act to a number of Muslim organisations who had denounced Islamophobia. He accused them of inciting radical Muslims to commit vengeful acts and called for their dissolution.7

6 Source: https://www.la-croix.com/Religion/Islam/A-Nice-plus-d-un-tiers-des-vic times-de-confession-musulmane-2016-07-18-1200776578. Accessed October 2021. 7 ‘Darmanin annonce la dissolution officielle du CCIF [Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France] en conseil des ministres’, L’Obs, 2 December 2020. https://www.nouvelobs. com/mort-de-samuel-paty/20201202.OBS36912/darmanin-annonce-la-dissolution-offici elle-du-ccif-en-conseil-des-ministres.html. Accessed October 2021.

7

FRENCH MUSLIMS: A SILENT COMMUNITY?

75

However, there were a number of out of the ordinary initiatives: nonMuslim pupils (atheists, Catholics or Jews) enrolled in state schools were invited to dialogue with others, enrolled in Muslim denominational establishments: ‘When an attack affects Catholics, we are all Catholics. When an attack affects a teacher, we are all teachers. We are united to fight this scourge which ultimately affects us all’.8 The very many condemnations of terrorist acts committed in the ‘name of Islam’ or ‘to avenge the honour of the Prophet’ and the wide array of expression of sensitivities and of ‘mourning’ confirms the hypothesis of a commemorative polysemy.

Being ‘Charlie’ in One’s Own Way While the institutions representative of Islam in France (the French Council for Muslim Worship and the Regional Councils for Muslim Worship), the large mosques and the main Muslim federations of France condemned the January attacks, discrete criticism was also expressed at the local level (associations and prayer rooms) and especially in the ‘muslimosphere’ (community networks on the Internet). On the fringes of institutional Islam, there was even an adversarial debate on the question of whether or not to display Je suis Charlie, the logo created by Joachim Roncin (Calabrese 2020). Many Muslim organisations and personalities joined the ‘national mourning’, taking part in marches and vigils. As they did so, they emphasised their reluctance to accept the slogan Je suis Charlie or to appreciate the publication by the weekly magazine of new cartoons representing the Prophet Muhammad wearing a turban vaguely evoking the shape of a penis and carrying a sign reading ‘Je suis Charlie. Everything is forgiven’. Even the Office of the French Council for Muslim Worship expressed reservations ‘as to the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo which offends the sensibilities of Muslims’9 in spite of its eagerness to present the image of a law abiding ‘respectable Islam’ and its keenness to maintain good relations with the political authorities. 8 Younès Yousfi, deputy head of the Muslim lycée Ibn Khaldoun in Marseille: ‘Hommage à Samuel Paty: des élèves musulmans et catholiques se rassemblent à Marseille pour prôner le “vivre ensemble”, France 3, February 11, 2020. https://france3-regions.france tvinfo. Accessed October 2021. 9 Office of the French Council for Muslim Worship, press release dated 14 January 2015.

76

V. GEISSER

Ordinary Muslims, not affiliated with religious associations or federations, were reluctant to adopt the slogan ‘Je suis Charlie’. They considered that it obscured the ‘other victims’ of terrorism, and appealed to the combination of a republican homage with respect for the ‘sensitivity’ of Muslim believers (Badouard 2019). In general, these ordinary Muslims preferred self-censoring their own feelings for fear of being accused of boycotting national mourning and of being perceived as complacent towards terrorists: On Facebook, everyone was saying “I’m Charlie”, and there was kind of a pressure if you didn’t. (…) Of course I condemned the terrorists’ acts. It’s horrible what they did. But that doesn’t make me Charlie, because I don’t support the publications of this journal and being Charlie is a bit reductive.

Other Muslims, who conveyed an identity-based conception of Islam, also expressed a clear desire to hijack Joachim Roncin’s slogan and turned it into a slogan to the glory of the Prophet Muhammad. After January 2015, alternative slogans circulated on social networks, for example ‘I am a Muslim with Muhammad’, ‘I am Muhammad’, ‘I am a Muslim and I love my Prophet’, etc. In the strongly emotional context after the attacks, Muslims in France often adjusted their identities: the affirmation of a religious allegiance and an emotional attachment to the prophetic figure (Muhammad) were combined with more classic expressions of citizenship, patriotism and participation in national mourning.

A Reinvention of Republican and Religious Rituals More than being the expression of an antinomy between citizenship and religiosity, the reactions of Muslims in France to the Islamist attacks showed a symbiotic relationship between the ‘religious sacred’ and the ‘profane sacred’, with individuals simultaneously invoking Allah and the Republic. On and around the sites hit by the attacks of 13 November 2015, for example, many Muslims came to deposit bouquets of flowers and short messages. Written in Arabic or French, these were a mixture of Muslim prayers, the expression of their solidarity with the victims and a way of voicing their attachment to the idea of living together (Truc 2020; Frouard 2020).

7

FRENCH MUSLIMS: A SILENT COMMUNITY?

77

Appropriating a tradition initiated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, several Muslim associations and federations decided, after the attacks of January 2015, to institutionalise the practice of a Muslim prayer for France, on the model of the prayer for the Republic uttered on Shabbat in French synagogues.10 From November 2015, local and national Muslim officials, from the most conservative to the most liberal, elected to hoist the French red-white-and-blue flag on mosques and the headquarters of Muslim associations (around a hundred throughout France). This symbolic act, unprecedented in the recent history of Islam in France, followed the French President’s call for the flag to be flown (Boussaguet and Faucher 2016). It was accompanied by a patriotic discourse reminiscent of those produced under the Third Republic by Jewish notables in favour of a total assimilation of the Jews of France to the Nation. For instance, Dalil Boubakeur, the Rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, addressed the Citizens’ Rally of the Muslims of France, convened at Institut du Monde Arabe on 29 November 2015 and declared: ‘We are proud of and attached to this homeland which welcomed us and our parents. […] Let us be proud to be French and to belong to the land of human rights and the Enlightenment, of freedom of thought and tolerance. […] Let us work with our children as citizens for the defence of Peace in our country and in our families’. Since the 2015 attacks, large Muslim gatherings in France have mobilised a patriotic symbolism that was more discreet previously. Although renowned for its conservatism and its proximity to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (‘Muslims of France’ since 2017) adorns the main stage of its meetings in redwhite-and-blue. The symbiosis between secular rituals and religious rituals works: the tricolour and the national anthem combine with religious songs (anashid) to the glory of the Prophet Muhammad, giving this community gathering the atmosphere of a patriotic gathering. Finally, after the November 2015 attacks, many Muslim Internet users updated their profile photos on Facebook with a tricolour filter, as a sign of solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attacks. This decision to display the national emblem, while common to many Internet users, also reflected a change of attitude in the way the new generations of Muslims 10 Rachid Barbouch, “Le RMF prône une prière pour la France chaque vendredi”, Blog Mediapart, 7 July 2015. https://blogs.mediapart.fr/rachid-barbouch/blog/070215/lermf-prone-une-priere-pour-la-france-chaque-vendredi. Accessed October 2021.

78

V. GEISSER

who had been socialised and educated in France related to national identity. Although ‘French on paper’, many had felt a sort of uneasiness in publicly asserting their attachment to the French nation, because of the colonial dispute and because of their experience of everyday racism. For that matter, the terrorist attacks produced a disinhibiting effect and incited a number of young Muslims, practising or not, to express their patriotism in the public sphere.

Conclusion Since the 2015 attacks, the Muslims of France have been confronted with contradictory injunctions. Far from pushing them into paralysis and silence, this situation has actually led them to develop original responses that have helped them both reverse the stigma they felt and reject the implicit suspicion of complicity with radical jihadism, passivity and silence. The reaction to the attacks of representatives of institutional Islam was largely framed by their close relations with local and national public authorities, by routine cooperation with security authorities (the Ministry of the Interior and the prefectures) and by regular dialogues with French opinion leaders and intellectuals and with the dignitaries of other religions. In the circumstances, their main concern was to consolidate the image of a ‘respectable Islam’ (Dazey 2019) consistent with secular and republican values. Beyond responses guided by their position within the institutional framework, their initiatives also aimed at developing a Muslim counter-narrative to the religious rhetoric of terrorist organisations (Bajrafil 2018; Oubrou 2019; Mamoun 2017). In the same context, ordinary Muslims drew on very diverse registers, usually less formal and ‘official’ in their format. Their participation in post-attack marches and vigils was strongly linked not only to the local context, their socio-professional status, their age and their educational background, but also to their integration into Muslim or non-Muslim associations. The most active and visible individuals in the post-terrorist mobilisations were the new middle and upper-class Muslims in France, often strongly involved in the public debate and very involved in the civic community. One can thus apply to the French population of Muslim culture and/or religion the classic sociological analyses linking levels of mobilisation to social characteristics. It appears that the intensity and the frequency of mobilisation against terrorist violence and the propensity to publicly express adhesion to the mourning community simply reflect the

7

FRENCH MUSLIMS: A SILENT COMMUNITY?

79

unequal distribution of social and political resources among individuals and groups (Mayer and Tiberj 2016). However, the attacks also had a specific effect: the double-bind constraint we have discussed (demonstrating as an ordinary citizen while displaying one’s Islamicness) was also a vector of politicisation for a number of French Muslims who experienced as a burden their ‘invisibility’ within the Republic. They used their participation in collective mobilisations to distance themselves from the disparaging view of a ‘Muslim silence’ in the face of Islamist attacks.

References Badouard, R. 2019. Être ou ne pas être “Charlie”. Débattre des attentats sur la page Facebook d’un média musulman. Sciences de la socieété 102: 111–133. https://doi.org/10.4000/sds.7150. Bajrafil, M. 2018. Réveillons-nous! Lettre à un jeune Français musulman. Paris: édition Plein du Jour. Boussaguet, L., and F. Faucher. 2016. Mobiliser des symboles pour répondre au terrorisme: l’exécutif français face aux attentats de 2015 à Paris. LIEPP Policy Brief 28. https://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/6ndhje5f5f89trlj1s 95p1phgt/resources/2016-faucher-mobiliser-des-symboles.pdf?_ga=2.230 349788.1317289171.1537440544-248593514.1535012979. Calabrese, L. 2020. Être ou ne pas être Charlie? Parcours d’un hashtag devenu argument. The Conversation, 13 September. https://theconversation. com/etre-ou-ne-pas-etre-charlie-parcours-dun-hashtag-devenu-argument-145 736/. Charrihi, H. 2017. Ma mère patrie: face aux attentats restons unis. Paris: éditions de La Martinière. Cohen, M. 2008. Les déclinaisons historiques du franco-judaïsme et ses critiques contemporaines. Archives de sciences sociales des religions 144: 141–161. Dazey, M. 2019. Les conditions de production locale d’un islam respectable. Genèses 117 (4): 74–93. https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.117.0074. Frouard, H. 2020. Un monument de papier: Les registres de condoléances de la mairie du 11e arrondissement. In Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre, ed. S. Gensburger and G. Truc, 173–191. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Geisser, V. 2020. Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by trying to prevent it? The New York Times, 21 October. ———, and Y. Nouiouar. 2020. La violence terroriste au nom du prophète: ce que les jeunes Français musulmans en pensent vraiment. The Conversation, 29 October. https://theconversation.com/la-violence-terroriste-au-nom-duprophete-ce-que-les-jeunes-francais-musulmans-en-pensent-vraiment-149105.

80

V. GEISSER

———, O. Marongiu-Perria, and K. Smail. 2016. Musulmans de France, la grande épreuve: face au terrorisme. Ivry-sur-Seine: éditions de L’Atelier. Hadjab, W. 2015. Les musulmans français se manifestent pour protéger leur citoyenneté et le sens de leur sacré. Zaman France, November 26. Mamoun, M. 2017. L’islam contre le radicalisme: manuel de contre-offensive. Paris: éditions du Cerf. Mauger, G. 2015. Sur les attentats des 7 et 9 janvier 2015. Savoir/agir 31: 81–88. https://doi.org/10.3917/sava.031.0081. Mayer, N., and V. Tiberj. 2016. Who Were the ‘Charlie’ in the Streets? A SocioPolitical Approach of the January 11 Rallies. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 59–68. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.63. Oubrou, T. 2019. Appel à la réconciliation! Foi musulmane et valeurs de la République française. Paris: Plon. Roy, O. 2015. La peur d’une communauté qui n’existe pas. Le Monde, 9 January. Schnapper, D., C. Bordes-Benayoun, and F. Raphaël. 2009. La condition juive en France: la tentation de l’entre-soi. Paris: PUF. Sèze, R. 2015. Leaders musulmans et fabrication d’un “islam civil.” Confluences Méditerranée 95 (4): 43–58. https://doi.org/10.3917/come.095.0043. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks, trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2020. Ce que disent les messages du 13 novembre. In Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre, ed. S. Gensburger and G. Truc, 127–158. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.

CHAPTER 8

At the Upper Echelons of the State: Symbols to Build National Unity Laurie Boussaguet and Florence Faucher

Abstract The French executive reacted within minutes of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, visiting the affected sites and making comments in the media. In the following hours and days, they articulated a frame for the interpretation of the collective trauma and offered a narrative of resilience. This chapter shows that the French executive worked consciously after the attacks to build and preserve a national unity that it feared would break up. The authors argue that the phenomenon of a ‘rally around the flag’ (the executive enjoyed renewed support, evident in public opinion and

L. Boussaguet (B) European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Faucher Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes et de politique comparée, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_8

81

82

L. BOUSSAGUET AND F. FAUCHER

in the attitudes of political actors) was not a ‘patriotic reflex’ but was politically and socially constructed by President Hollande, Prime Minister Valls, Interior Minister Cazeneuve and their teams. Based on interviews with the actors involved, they demonstrate that symbolic public action was prepared carefully and consciously and intended to prevent potential outbursts of violence. Keywords Symbolic · Public policy · Framing · French government · Terrorism · Crisis management · National unity

In the United States, international events involving national security have often been accompanied by strong public support for the President, first and foremost the attacks of 9/11. To explain this phenomenon of ‘rallying around the flag’ (Brody 1991), scholars have put forward two hypotheses: a patriotic reflex and a reluctance of the opposition to play its critical role in times of crisis. International comparisons have shown, however, that this phenomenon is far from guaranteed. In European democracies, its existence and scale depend on structural and situational factors, such as the repetition of the attacks, the nature of the targets (anonymous or symbolic), the extent of the attack (number of victims), the type of regime (parliamentary or presidential) and the upcoming elections (Chowanietz 2016). In the weeks following the attacks of January and November 2015, public levels of confidence in the French President and in his government improved suddenly and significantly (+10 points in February 2015 and +20 points in December 2015 compared to the previous month’s figures for the President, +14 and + 11 for the Prime Minister).1 In January, the opposition suspended its criticism and appealed for national unity; the press described the President’s handling of the crisis as ‘flawless’ (sans faute).2 In November, reactions were more varied: the opposition spoke of ‘solidarity with the government’ rather than ‘national unity’ but gave the President a standing ovation at the Congress in Versailles on 16 November.

1 https://www.tns-sofres.com/cotes-de-popularites. Accessed July 2017. 2 https://www.francetvinfo.fr/faits-divers/attaque-au-siege-de-charlie-hebdo/attentats-

terroristes-les-moments-cles-du-sans-faute-de-francois-hollande_797591.html. October 2021.

Accessed

8

AT THE UPPER ECHELONS …

83

It would be wrong to think that these phenomena of rallying around the flag are taken for granted or passively expected by the executive. As we will see in the case of France, the trio at the helm played a key role in this development, in particular through its mobilisation of symbolic resources. The widespread presence of symbols in post-terrorist political processes has not as yet been analysed in detail by the social sciences. Our purpose, of course, is not to say that state action following the attacks can be reduced to this aspect, but rather that the symbolic is an important if often overlooked instrument in such situations, and one that is incorporated into complex mechanisms. In support of our argument, we will draw on fieldwork carried out between 2015 and 20203 : around thirty interviews with members of the staff of the President, the Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior; with the Prime Minister, the Interior Minister and the Justice Minister; with personalities from political parties and officers of the Paris mayor; and with staff from the Government Information Service (SIG); internal documents including analyses and surveys produced or used by teams of employees; and letters and notes sent to the President in the hours and weeks following the attacks.

Following Opinion by Guiding It When the Charlie Hebdo attack occurred, the President was immediately alerted by his teams about the fragility of social cohesion and the risk of intercommunal violence. These warnings appeared in internal notes and emails and were mentioned by all the advisers we met: they stated that there was a potential for the radicalisation of small groups, some of them already active and identified, which might develop into real violence against the Muslim population. Upon arriving at the Élysée, François Hollande appointed an adviser to follow the public moods and work with the press office. The team at the Élysée—in other words the offices of the President—used polling data communicated by the SIG, monitored social networks and the regional press, scrutinised the presidential mail and listened to their personal contacts in order to provide daily briefings to the President during the period. The monitoring of social forums by specialised teams made it possible to identify two trends as of 8 January: the critique of political elites and ‘the stigmatisation of immigration and 3 In the context of the SYMBOLITIQUE project, funded by the Labex LIEPP (ANR11 LABX0091, ANR11 IDEX000502).

84

L. BOUSSAGUET AND F. FAUCHER

Islam’ (Élysée email). Qualitative surveys discussed at the SIG revealed the coexistence of increasingly distinct social groups, some within the Muslim community but also others, characterised by hard-core signs of rejection of Islam. These trends raised concerns and appeared to be corroborated by the resurgence of attacks both verbal and physical on Muslims and their places of worship, as reported in the press in January as well as November. ‘Muslim communities are afraid’ and ‘disturbed’ by attacks on places of worship, noted an Élysée email on 9 January, which also underlined that it was necessary to ‘reassure them’ and ‘invite them to express themselves’. In the following months, tensions rose further. The Élysée deals daily with a large flow of letters and emails expressing nuances of opinion distinct from those traditionally expressed in the media. In November, government teams perceived a change in tone in the reactions of the public as expressed on social media and in the local press. This change of mood was particularly striking in the messages received at the Élysée. These were ‘very uncivil’ and ‘very far from the spirit of Charlie’, and there was a ‘risk of disunity or even disintegration’, said one adviser. Moreover, opinion polls revealed growing ‘anger’ (email of 17 November and note of 19 November). Moreover, whilst the very specific targets of January (Charlie Hebdo, the police, the Jewish community) had kept the threat at a certain distance, November’s anonymous victims had been chosen to provoke a general sense of terror: everyone could imagine being a potential victim. The impact on public opinion was immediate (Fourquet and Lebourg 2017). An internal memo at the Élysée also noted a ‘sense of dismay’ that France was under attack ‘less for what we are but simply because we are… the problem is not our values (…) [and] it is much more difficult to understand’ (20 November).

Communication and Political Action In times of crisis, people turn to their leaders, from whom they expect protection and solidarity. Specific aspects of the presidential role are brought to the fore then (Boussaguet and Faucher 2018): the ‘PR’ (as the President is called in the corridors of power) ‘no longer expresses himself as a person but really as a symbol, elected by universal suffrage’, stated one Élysée advisor. The President’s communications integrate gestures, context and movements to convey his messages to different audiences: ‘for each of the decisions that were taken that day, there was this desire

8

AT THE UPPER ECHELONS …

85

(…) to bring together, to calm, to reassure, and to protect’. The President’s immediate visit to the scene of the attack ‘gives national and (…) even international significance to the event (…) and it also reassures people’. The January schedule of presidential engagements made it possible to focus attention on national unity: ‘the reception (…) planned [for the next day] with religious leaders [was kept] because (…) it is a significant symbol and one of the roles [of the President] is to prevent the French from being divided or clashing’; political leaders, from the opposition and key institutions (Presidents of the Assemblies and of the Association of Mayors of France) were also invited to the Élysée whilst other events were cancelled. Moreover, in such circumstances, the executive has a head start on the opposition and the media, which allows it to set an interpretive framework early on and gives it an advantage in the controversies that inevitably emerge. It is important to propose ‘credible’ frameworks that the gradual discovery of the facts will not call into question.4 These frameworks are effective only if they can gain a hearing, and many in the communication teams doubt they can influence opinion if it is not already tending in that direction. At the Élysée Palace, one adviser admitted: ‘I no longer believe in the slightest that politicians have any ability to (…) impose things that people don’t actually think’ (interview, April 2017). This conviction explains why the suggestions made to the President are based on advisers’ interpretations of the context and of public opinion. So, in January, the strategy was ‘to find the words to express what is being done spontaneously’, because ‘people feel that it is sincere, truthful’. The ‘almost spontaneous’ gatherings in January (Boussaguet and Faucher 2017) were replaced in November by ‘the desire to be useful’ (note, 20 November), to mobilise and take up a more militant stance. The executive’s communication team therefore shifted to a more warlike framing of events (Faucher and Boussaguet 2018). Whilst only the Prime Minister had used the term ‘war’ after the January attacks, this word was very quickly adopted in November. It was hammered out in speeches to the Congress5 (by the President), the National Assembly (by the Prime Minister) and everywhere else. Six out of ten French people thought that 4 As illustrated by the resounding electoral defeat of the Partido Popular, days after Aznar’s government blamed Basque separatists for the 2004 Madrid bombings. 5 The National Assembly and the Senate meet exceptionally together, in what is then called Congrès, in Versailles.

86

L. BOUSSAGUET AND F. FAUCHER

France was at war (Fourquet and Lebourg 2017: 15). Unsurprisingly, the tone changed again in July 2016 when another attack took place in Nice: a Note, addressed to the President on 15 July, considers that public opinion shows no sign anymore of ‘an instinct or a call for national unity’. Then, the Élysée teams struggled to define public expectations; the executive’s speeches appear more timid and defensive. It is impossible to reconstruct, a posteriori, chains of causality that would allow us to demonstrate that communications from the executive decisively guided perceptions of public opinion but we have analysed here how they intended to do so. However, we can interpret the absence of a spiral of intolerance after the attacks as a sign that the framework imposed by the executive played a part in public opinion’s reactions (see Tiberj, Chapter 9). The President’s communications advisor highlights the counterfactual and considers that ‘we can see that it worked by looking at what did not happen. What did not happen was intercommunal violence, or a settling of scores’.

Rallying the People with Symbols To get the messages across, the executive’s communication teams used sets and actors in such a way as to instil a sense of authenticity in the performance (Goffman 1956). For example, they advised distinguishing between roles within the executive, with the Prime Minister (‘PM’) taking on the role of ‘bad cop’ and the President (‘PR’) that of ‘protector and unifier’ (email, 9 January). They also suggested using symbols—gestures, images, objects, sounds, etc.,—to convey particular meanings and drew them from the routine repertoires of the state. The advisers very quickly suggested the usual practices at comparable events: national mourning, with flags at half-mast and minutes of silence, visits to victims and tributes to servants of the state. As the Élysée communications manager told us, ‘unfortunately, in France, there have been attacks and there will be others, so (…) we know what we are doing and we make decisions right away’ (interview, June 2015). Every situation, however, requires the fine tuning and the adaptation of the symbolic response to the specific context. Symbols are immediately recognisable but they are also ambiguous: they give rise to more or less free and conscious associations of ideas and are likely to have different connotations for different audiences. The national flag, for example, does of course evoke France, but for some it refers to a repertoire of military action and resistance, and for others to

8

AT THE UPPER ECHELONS …

87

sports competitions, and therefore to emotions of sharing and jubilation (Lagadec et al. 2019). In addition, symbolism ‘blocks personal curiosity, organises public memory, and heroically imposes certainty on uncertainty’ (Douglas 1986: 102). It suggests a path of (re)action that appears legitimate, meets expectations and contributes to the internalisation of ways of behaving because it links affective, physical and cognitive dimensions. The staging of government action after the 2015 attacks took these considerations into account. The ‘faultless’ reaction of January, for example, was attributed to the decision to do little (‘we tried to not overdo it’) in order to say more. The 11 January march was not initiated by the executive, but its support contributed greatly to its success (Boussaguet and Faucher 2017). This extraordinary event was the result of a sharing of roles: the parliamentary parties launched the idea of a republican march, which the Prime Minister’s office largely organised. The President’s team intervened to stage political unity and to organise the parade of international heads of states and of governments; President Hollande himself called on the population to take part in order to demonstrate the cohesion of the nation. In order for the march to be inclusive and not to give any pretext for accusations of division or exclusion, the instructions were: ‘no signs, no slogans, no speeches’. This allowed the focusing of attention on the crowds themselves and contributed to create the impression that there was a degree of consensus. Four million people marched in France, according to official figures. The images of crowds (alternatively silent, singing the Marseillaise or applauding the police) broadcast by the media gave the impression of a united social body (Bazin 2018). Two days later, the Prime Minister addressed the National Assembly and talked about a ‘spirit of 11 January’. The phrase, which sought to both capture and fix this interpretation of the rally, was repeated many times thereafter. So much so that dissenting voices challenging the seductive image of national unity were slow to emerge (Baudot 2015). Symbolic practices do not preclude all criticism, but it is remarkable how long it took for such criticism to be voiced (with Emmanuel Todd’s short book Who is Charlie? receiving the most attention) or how rare it actually was. Interestingly, resistance to the minute’s silence was expressed in a few schools, where children who were the least likely to perceive the implications of their rebellion for the adult world had had no time to be prepared by teachers. Such haste in the organising of the ritual was not repeated in November (Ledoux 2017 and see Chapter 6). These discrepancies show us that the government benefited

88

L. BOUSSAGUET AND F. FAUCHER

from a certain latency period in political reactions, but also remind us that rituals create the illusion of support—this is what is important at the time, even if interpretations change later.

The Borders of National Unity The government anticipated further attacks after January and planned accordingly; a briefing note recommended declaring a state of emergency and placing the PR centre stage.6 Stepping up the reaction was also meant to demonstrate that the state was learning and responding proportionally and proactively. After the attacks of 13 November, the executive felt that it had only limited room for manoeuvre to showcase national unity. It sought the appropriate symbols to link collective identity with individual experiences. It expected more resistance from the opposition, which had not been best pleased at having to support the executive in January, and was preoccupied by the upcoming regional elections. The political parties were ‘extremely aggressive’, commented one adviser. However, attacking the government was still perceived as a high-risk strategy by a number of party leaders. The moderate right adopted contradictory postures: criticism expressed on the steps of the Élysée, support during the Congress, but scathing attacks in the National Assembly two days later. As a consequence, advisers recommended ‘the very strong use of all Republican symbols to (…) hold the country together - but from above, this time, because it was not holding together just from below’ (interview, April 2017). Security operations and the state of emergency prohibited the organisation of public gatherings. Moreover, unlike in January, ‘there is no truly shared rallying symbol. This time, no slogan has been generally adopted. The sole exception is the tricolour shown on the social media profiles’ (note, 20 November). The tribute to the victims organised at the Invalides on 27 November was closed to the public. The executive thus sought a symbolic gesture to enable everyone to participate in a sense of national togetherness. The flag was chosen because it was a symbol that was not ‘subject to contestation or political controversy and everyone could relate to it’, explained one adviser. A note specified that it could be used as a rallying sign, at the risk of being merely a ‘reflex of protection

6 “Le jour d’après”, from the Secrétariat général de la Défense nationale, Note sent to the Prime Minister in summer 2015.

8

AT THE UPPER ECHELONS …

89

and patriotism’ (20 November). This is how we can understand François Hollande’s unusual call to fly the flag at private windows and balconies. Political unity was more fragile than at the beginning of the year and required more attention, explained the communications advisor of the Élysée. In an effort to build it up, the executive decided to ‘show that we had taken the full measure of the threat and that we wanted to preserve all the bonds uniting the nation, all the threads of the social body, so as to avoid disintegration’. The President, he adds, thus decided to take the first step by adopting ‘the ideas of others’. These included a reform of citizenship rules, which seemed to be a relatively risk-free concession. Indeed, it would merely serve to reaffirm the boundaries of belonging to the nation. Moreover, the forfeiture of nationality for people with dual nationality already existed. It was a gesture towards the right and the far right, and a policy that had been shown to be consensual in public opinion in successive surveys since January.7 When debate on the forfeiture of nationality intensified on the left, the government claimed it was a ‘symbolic measure’,8 devoid of practical implication.9 However, this ‘measure (…) was only of interest if it was passed quickly. From the moment, it gets bogged down in parliamentary debates, it becomes a real question, no longer a symbolic question’, regretted the Minister of Justice, JeanJacques Urvoas (interview, March 2018). President Hollande had not anticipated such a shift, but symbols are, of course, ambiguous. They link collective representations to individual experiences. ‘The hope was one of speaking to the nation, but the reality is that [the reform] has upset all those who (…) knew someone who had obtained nationality’, explained the minister in the same interview. After four months of parliamentary debate, and faced with the impossibility of reconciling the two assemblies, the President abandoned the constitutional reform on 30 March 2016.

7 http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2016/01/10/les-francais-sont-moins-fav orables-a-la-decheance-de-nationalite-pour-l-ensemble-des-binationaux_4844714_823448. html_-_janvier_2016. Accessed July 2017. 8 See Manuel Valls’ speech Menaces terroristes: protéger les Français dans la durée. 23 December 2015. http://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/6127-menaces-terroristes-pro teger-les-francais-dans-la-duree. Accessed July 2017. 9 The Council of State conceded, in a motion passed on 23 December 2015, that ‘this measure would have a limited practical scope’: http://www.conseil-tat.fr/content/dow nload/52673/464571/version/1/file/390866Avis.pdf. Accessed July 2017.

90

L. BOUSSAGUET AND F. FAUCHER

By July 2016, when an attack struck the city of Nice, political unity was only a memory. Local leaders of the opposition (such as Christian Estrosi, MP and mayor of Nice) immediately condemned the executive’s failure to prevent the carnage. This new context, together with a lack of clarity about the expectations of the population, partly explains the defensive, almost timid, attitudes adopted by the President and the Prime Minister. The use of symbolic instruments was limited to routine practices as if policy-makers considered that doing anything else may, in itself, draw attention to the difficulty of articulating a frame that would not be immediately criticised.

Conclusion We have argued that the upper echelons of the state’s reactions to the attacks which struck France in 2015 and 2016 involved the mobilisation of many symbols and symbolic practices. These were used in order to (re)build a national unity threatened by the attacks and in response to the perceived expectations of the population. It is of course impossible to say what would have happened if the government had not responded to this demand for unity. But analysis of the situations in January and November shows that social disintegration was avoided whilst the image of a national consensus was promoted, most notably through the 11 January march. However, if symbols are vectors of national unity, they also carry many different meanings and this can be difficult to fully control, as evidenced by the abandonment of the reform on the forfeiture of nationality. Likewise, the use of symbols was rendered more complex by the repetition of the attacks, upcoming elections and the fact that public opinion showed no clear pattern or direction, as was the case after the Nice attack in July 2016.

References Baudot, P.-Y. 2015. Le 11-janvier: crise ou consensus? La Vie des Idées, September 15. https://laviedesidees.fr/Le-11-janvier-crise-ou-consen sus.html. Bazin, M. 2018. Peuples en larmes, peuples en marches: la médiatisation des affects lors des attentats de janvier 2015. Mots. Les langages du politique 118: 75–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23653.

8

AT THE UPPER ECHELONS …

91

Boussaguet, L., and F. Faucher. 2017. Quand l’État convoque la rue: la marche républicaine du 11 janvier 2015. Gouvernement et action publique 6 (2): 37– 61. https://doi.org/10.3917/gap.172.0037. ———. 2018. La construction des discours présidentiels post-attentats à l’épreuve du temps. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118: 95–115. https:// doi.org/10.4000/mots.23867. Brody, R. 1991. Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion and Public Support. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chowanietz, C. 2016. Bombs, Bullets, and Politicians: France’s Response to Terrorism. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. Douglas, M. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Faucher, F., and L. Boussaguet. 2018. The Politics of Symbols: Reflections on the French Government’s Framing of the 2015 Terrorist Attacks. Parliamentary Affairs 71 (1): 169–195. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsx013. Fourquet, J., and N. Lebourg. 2017. La nouvelle guerre d’Algérie n’aura pas lieu. Paris: Fondation Jean Jaurès. Goffman, E. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Lagadec, P., L. Le Gall, J.-F. Simon, and M. Thomas. 2019. Passage à l’acte: arborer un drapeau tricolore après les attentats du 13-Novembre (Brest, 27 novembre 2015). Ethnologie française 173: 45–62. https://doi.org/10. 3917/ethn.191.0045. Ledoux, S. 2017. L’École à l’épreuve de l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo: quand les minutes de silence parlent aussi. Mémoires en jeu 4: 65–71.

CHAPTER 9

In People’s Minds: An Authoritarian Dynamic or the Spread of Tolerance? Vincent Tiberj

Abstract Do Islamist terrorist attacks systematically trigger a xenophobic response among citizens? In this chapter, Vincent Tiberj argues that, if this happens, it is not the attack as such that caused it, but rather the way actors, pundits and politicians made sense of it and framed it. To demonstrate this, he uses data from the CNCDH barometer (a yearly opinion poll, which covers the 1990–2018 period on issues of racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia) and specifically the longitudinal index of tolerance. France has experienced several Islamist attacks, notably in 1995, in 2012, and then in the years 2015–2017. However, tolerance of minorities in France through this period, according to this barometer, has progressed strongly, especially after the attacks of 2015. This evolution reflects the influence of the dominant interpretative frame

V. Tiberj (B) Sciences Po Bordeaux, Centre Émile Durkheim, Bordeaux, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_9

93

94

V. TIBERJ

after these events, which carefully distinguished the attackers from the Muslim population and other ethnic and religious minorities. Keywords Framing · Terrorist attacks (social responses to) · Public opinion · Xenophobia · Tolerance

After the 2015–2016 jihadist attacks, one might have expected France to experience a surge of xenophobia similar to what spread across the United States after the 2001 Al Qaeda attacks: racist assaults increased ninefold according to FBI figures,1 and American opinion shifted towards a heightened rejection of Islam and Muslims (Smith 2013). In the case of the attacks committed in France, anti-Muslim acts and racist acts in general peaked in 2015 (according to the Ministry of the Interior), but we will see that there was still no ‘authoritarian dynamic’ (Stenner 2005) in public opinion. On the contrary, there was a rise in tolerance, even though it had fallen sharply in previous years. My thesis is that it is not the terrorist attacks themselves that influence opinion, but the framing, the interpretative frameworks, that social, political and media elites place on them. These stories interact with longer-term factors, themselves favourable to increasing tolerance within French society. This chapter examines the impact of framing on citizens’ perceptions when an attack occurs. By framing, we mean the way in which the different media pundits, associations, politicians and intellectuals give meaning to an event (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). The hypothesis defended here is that the attacks, considered as a ‘focusing event’, do not produce a specific dynamic of opinion per se (nor automatically a withdrawal into oneself), but rather that what is decisive is the way a society interprets and makes sense of this event. For example, it does not have the same effect if you say that the perpetrators of the attacks are Muslims, or that they are jihadists who do not represent all Muslims. We will see that it is necessary to distinguish between the behaviour of the vast majority of citizens and the reactions of activists to whom a great deal of importance is often granted in matters of racism: what happens on social networks, and Islamophobic acts, do not correspond to changes 1 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/15/assaults-against-muslims-in-us-surpass-2001-level/.

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

95

in society in general. Admittedly, there are still too many anti-Semitic acts, but French society is less and less affected by prejudices against the Jewish minority. In addition, alongside the dynamics of opinion which will be analysed here, we must remember the demonstrations of 11 January 2015, the most significant since the Libération and the end of World War Two. There was no indication that they would be so far-reaching or would stand out from the anti-immigrant parades that occurred in several European countries. Emmanuel Todd has described them as a mobilisation aimed at ‘humiliating the weak in society, in other words the immigrants’ (Todd 2015). Yet, the ‘Charlies out in the streets’ were not xenophobic (Rouban 2015; Mayer and Tiberj 2016; Zerhouni et al. 2016). They belonged to the most open-minded and educated fringes of the French population; they tended to be young and urban and often on the left, and very far on the left for some of them. To understand why French citizens were not caught up in an authoritarian dynamic, let us first come back to the question of prejudices and values, and to the dominant approaches which too often consider them to be immutable characteristics of individuals when in fact, contexts and framing can actually lead important evolutions, either positive or reinforcing. Ultimately, we will be able to better understand the dynamics of opinion after the attacks of recent years.

Values Are Changing… Researchers working on values and prejudices often share what one might call a ‘stabilist’ conception. Ronald Inglehart writes: ‘to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years and these values change mainly through intergenerational population replacements’ (Inglehart 2008). Hence, the ‘impressionable years’ of childhood and adolescence would be the decisive period for the formation of values and prejudices (Alwin and Krosnick 1991). The authoritarian personality theory developed by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues (1950) fits in with this approach: such a personality is characterised by authoritarianism, social and gender conservatism, fascism and

96

V. TIBERJ

anti-Semitism.2 These values are still linked today, and the older generations, especially those born before 1950, stand out as having more conservative positions than recent cohorts. However, the thesis of the stability of values is difficult to sustain: citizens’ responses vary according to the wording of the questions in opinion polls or to the order of these questions. These variations can be observed on major subjects: for instance, support for abortion varies by 7 points depending on whether or not the questionnaire make reference to traditional values or to rape (Tourangeau et al. 1989). Such sensitivity to the context of any survey calls into question the existence of a stable and structured value system. More often than we think, individuals are inconsistent: they reject some minorities but not others, or else they are unstable in their dislike. At best, individuals consciously arbitrate between different values when making a choice, but often they are unaware of their own internal contradictions. These conflicts of values and context effects question the notion of authoritarian personality. A large proportion of authoritarian individuals become authoritarian only if an ‘authoritarian dynamic’ is set in motion. In other words, this attitude is the product of political and social contexts—when national unity appears to be in danger, for example (Stenner 2005). It is not a constant in their value system. The so-called threat theory analyses xenophobia as being the result of an interaction between ‘predisposing factors’ and ‘situational triggers’ (Sniderman et al. 2004). These could be situations that threaten the economy, well-being or national identity. However, the model of the trigger gives too much attention to events, and not enough attention to their framing, in other words to the narratives articulated by politicians, social leaders and the media. The 9/11 attacks, for example, were interpreted differently from one region of the world to another: some American media and politicians saw these attacks as a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ while the European media adopted an approach more centred on human dramas (Truc 2017, pp. 13–37). The framing is in fact the trigger for the dynamics of opinion, and not necessarily the event itself. In addition, an event does not give rise to just one single framing—in fact several narratives are in competition— and the impact of a given framing depends on the individual’s values. A 2 This theory is dated and marked by the American psychology of the 1950s, but there are still persistent and close connections between conservatism, homophobia, one’s vision of gender roles, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (Mayer et al. 2017).

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

97

xenophobic individual will follow a ‘clash of civilisation’ frame more easily than a citizen attached a multicultural society. When it comes to racism, we know that the framing effects are decisive. Paul Kellstedt argues (2003), following the work of John Zaller (1992), that individuals are deeply ambivalent on racial issues. Dispositions for opening or closing one’s mind to others coexist in each citizen: in the United States, for instance, this implies that a number of citizens simultaneously shelter considerations which lead them to accept racial mixing and others which lead them to think African-Americans should be held at bay. The domination of certain preferences over others depends on the context and particularly on the way in which political elites view diversity. For example, the framing initiated by the Republicans in the 1990s, which identifies the beneficiaries of the welfare state with African-Americans and portrays them as ‘profiteers’ of the system,3 permeates the views of American citizens as expressed in the following years, whereas the two issues, and the opinions relating to them, were not linked in the 1960s.

The Lessons of Opinion Terrorist attacks do not therefore automatically produce xenophobia. The emergence of an authoritarian dynamic depends on how political, intellectual and social elites make sense and interpret these events. This is shown by the dynamic of public opinion in France since 1998. Thanks to the longitudinal index of tolerance in Fig. 9.1 (Stimson et al. 2010), based on 65 series of questions from the annual barometer of the National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH), we can measure annual changes in tolerance towards minorities, minority religions and immigrants since 1990. This index shows that prejudices and tolerance evolve, sometimes brutally depending on political and contextual factors. Tolerance can increase strongly, often because the Right governs, or it can decrease sharply when the Left is in power. But other factors influence the level of tolerance and sometimes add up to provoke strong surge of intolerance. For example, between 2009 and 2013, various events fuelled intolerance in France: several xenophobic speeches by President Sarkozy, the 2008 economic crisis, a leftist government after May 2012, and the debate about same-sex marriage have produced the 3 For example, Ronald Reagan regularly stigmatised the ‘welfare queens’, the single mothers who were said to benefit illegally from the welfare system.

98

V. TIBERJ

Fig. 9.1 Longitudinal index of tolerance (1990–November 2018)

biggest drop of tolerance since 1990. It confirms that French citizens, like Americans, are ambivalent on these issues. To fully understand the temporality of the index, it should be noted that most CNCDH surveys take place in October–November, but that the 2015 point was constructed from a survey carried out in February 2015. In 2016, there were, by way of exception, two surveys, one in January and the other in November— which makes it possible to measure the impact of the attack which took place in Nice during the summer. Since the 1990s, the French have experienced Islamist attacks in 1995 and 1996 in Paris. There were also attacks in Washington and New York in September 2001, and in neighbouring countries in Madrid in March 2004, and in London in July 2005. However, in 1995, 2001 and 2004, the index shows no sign of an intolerance surge. In the first two cases, the index remained stable; and in the third, tolerance increased. The French then became even more tolerant between the wave of surveys in November 2014 and that of February 2015, despite the attacks of January 2015. The phenomenon occurred with greater intensity between February 2015 and January 2016, a period marked by the terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015. Finally, between January and November 2016, there was another increase in the index, despite the attack in Nice. On

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

99

the other hand, there was a significant drop between 2004 and 2005. At the time, there were riots in the suburbs and the dominant frame made an explicit link between the violence and a so-called failure of both of the French State and the migrants themselves, to properly integrate within French society (Tiberj 2008). Clearly, the interpretation of the 2015 attacks that prevailed in France did not increase prejudice against immigrants and Muslims, unlike in the United States post-9/11. Three dimensions of the public discourse made it possible to mobilise opinion, create feelings of resilience and collective resistance to attacks without ‘scapegoating’ any particular social group: appeals to national unity by public authorities and community leaders; the refusal to tar everyone with the same brush; the affirmation of republican values. The role of this framing of events was all the more important as its influence was felt in very different strata of the population. In some cases, tolerance rose rapidly, in others it took longer. To show this, I have calculated, in Figs. 9.2 and 9.3, the longitudinal index of tolerance, according to the birth cohort of individuals and their political positions, two variables which structure positions on cultural values in general and on values relating to immigration in particular.

Fig. 9.2 The longitudinal index of tolerance across birth cohorts

100

V. TIBERJ

Fig. 9.3 The longitudinal index of tolerance across ideological self-placement

We find predictable as well as more surprising results. First, the level of prejudice or openness is not the product of ageing, but rather is an echo of the worlds in which individuals have been socialised. So, people do not become intolerant with age, quite the contrary. For example, if prejudice came with age, then there ought to be a systematic decline in the index between the years 1999 and 2009. This happens in some periods, but in others there is an increase in tolerance. For example, between 1999 and 2009, each cohort aged by 10 years, yet tolerance increased considerably. This was true for the cohorts which mainly include retirees (born before 1940 or between 1940 and 1955), as well as for those that include people of working age (the 1956–1966 and 1957–1977 cohorts) and those including the younger generations who had just entered the labour market (born after 1977). Each new cohort is more tolerant than those that came before it. In 1999, respondents born before 1940 made up the most conservative cohort with a level of 36, while individuals born in the 1940–1966 period were at a level of 46 and those born after 1967 at a level of 54. In 2009, when the index of tolerance reached its historical high, the index for individuals born before 1940 was 53; it was between 64 and 65 for cohorts

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

101

born between 1940 and 1966, 69 for those born between 1967 and 1976 and 71 for individuals born afterwards. Beyond these results, we can clearly see that the evolution of tolerance within each cohort follows parallel paths, towards more openness or towards retrenchment. For example, between 2009 and 2013, the index fell by 16 points among respondents born in 1977 or after, as well as among those born before 1940. In some cases, a cohort is less sensitive to period effects. If we take, for example, the 2005 riots in the suburbs and the frames that prevailed then: tolerance fell by 10 points among those interviewed born before 1940 and by 12 points in the 1956–1966 cohort, but only by 6 points among the most recent cohort. How did these cohorts react to the 2015 and 2016 attacks? All age groups were, on average, more tolerant of Muslims, Jews and immigrants in January 2016 than they were in the autumn of 2014. And between January and November 2016, all but the 1956–1966 cohort made further progress. But this increase in tolerance followed a different chronology depending on which generation individuals belong to. In 2014, people born in the years 1967–1976 were at the same level as those born in the 1940s and 1950s. Nevertheless, individuals born between 1967 and 1976, and thereafter, were particularly responsive to the events of January 2015, with a marked rise in their tolerance index in the space of less than one quarter: +9 points for the former, +8 points for the latter. These cohorts are also those who most often joined demonstrations in January, or would have most liked to do so (Mayer and Tiberj 2016). Conversely, the baby boomers born in the years 1940–1955 seem not to have been affected (moreover, they were also the most opposed to the Je suis Charlie movement), while the level of tolerance of the members of the next cohort progressed by 4 points. One could fear that the generations might split over the meaning to be given to the 2015 attacks, with older generations being permeated by xenophobic tensions and post-baby-boom generations less ready to overgeneralisation and more attached to diversity. But the cohorts differed mainly in their reactivity to events. Thus, the tolerance of the cohorts born in 1956–1966 and 1940–1955 progressed much more quickly in the period February 2015–January 2016: +9 points for the former, + 10 points for the latter as against + 2 points for the cohort born in 1977 and after and +5 points for the 1967–1977 cohort. It is unfortunately impossible to date more precisely the period and the pace of this progression.

102

V. TIBERJ

What lays behind this increased tolerance? Was it the debate on the forfeiture of nationality between December and January? The anti-National Front rhetoric between the two rounds of the regional elections (in late November)? The photograph of little Aylan, the young Syrian refugee who drowned in September 2015? All of these elements may have played a role, to varying degrees, without the CNCDH barometer being able to capture it. But clearly, the 13 November attacks and the way they were framed played a part. When we also look at the political positions of those interviewed, we see that tolerance evolves in much the same way and that the chronology of its evolution is quite similar for each political side. First, left-wing voters are systematically more tolerant than centrist voters, who themselves are more tolerant than right-wing voters. The polarisation between the left and the right grew in the 2010s. This was mainly due to the resistance of respondents from the left to the retrenchment that marked the French electorate in the period 2009–2013: on the left, the index fell 6 points against 13 points on the right, bringing the index for this group to a level of tolerance (or intolerance) equivalent to that of the end of the 1990s. We can also see that the left showed rather more resistance to the dominant frame during the 2005 riots in the suburbs than the right (−3 points against −10). The left was more sensitive than the right to the events of January 2015: its tolerance index rose by 6 points (against 3 for the latter) between autumn 2014 and February 2015. Tolerance on the left thus returned to a level equivalent to that of the years 2010 and 2011 from March 2015 onwards, while the right-wing voters remained at levels comparable to those of the year 2000. On the other hand, the right wing made particular progress in the period February 2015–January 2016 (+9 points against +3 points for the left), probably following the attacks of 13 November. At the beginning of 2016, the left and the right finally regained and surpassed their historical record of tolerance of 2009. Only the voters of the centre were less tolerant in 2016 than in 2009. In November 2016, the left even reached its maximum tolerance (74 points), while the centre increased by 4 points and the right remained more or less stable. Analysis of this period therefore reveals a different elasticity to context depending on political positions: between 2009 and 2014, in a context of rising intolerance, the left held up rather well while the right was much more affected. One of the lessons of the period, however, is that this

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

103

elasticity can work in both directions. One could point the finger at the responsibility of certain leaders of the Right in the rise of a climate of intolerance during the period 2010–2013: for instance, President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech in Grenoble in 2010 that adopted a strongly ‘antiimmigrant’ tone; in 2012, Jean-François Copé, former president of the French main conservative party at the time, claimed that one school pupil had ‘had his chocolate bun torn away from him by thugs claiming that you can’t eat during Ramadan’; the Justice Minister Christine Taubira was also attacked during the debate on same-sex marriage law because she is Black, with arguments very close to traditional biological racism theory. Conversely, the rise in tolerance on the right after the attacks of November 2015 (and not before) could result from the positions taken by certain political figures of the time such as Xavier Bertrand, Alain Juppé and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who concurred with the dominant frame of the attacks. Another explanation is that right-wing voters were initially more resistant to a frame of the January attacks that went against their values, but were ultimately ‘affected’ by what happened in November. Let us remember that this political positioning is more and more a matter of cultural values, especially those relating to authority or diversity, while tolerance is largely a dominant and shaping issue on the left (Tiberj 2017).

Conclusion In order to understand the dynamics of opinion in the aftermath of attacks, it is therefore essential to take into account the way such events are framed—interpreted and narrated. Following the 2015 and 2016 attacks, one might have expected a surge of intolerant opinions. But in fact the reverse happened. If the French polity was able to resolve the tensions revealed by the traumatic events and resisted turning against minorities, it was undoubtedly thanks to the many who played a part in this feat. These included journalists, political leaders and parties, intellectuals, civic associations who articulated frames that came to dominate. We also need to add to the list the organisers and the participants of the ‘Republican march’ of 11 January, who helped focus collective attention on the unity of the nation. The index of tolerance did indeed increase in the French population by 2 points in 3 months. The balance of the interpretive framing was undoubtedly fragile and, in retrospect, France came

104

V. TIBERJ

close to a reaction similar to that of the USA after 11 September 2001— one can imagine, for example, a situation in which the debates about the forfeiture of nationality would have led to a retrenching of attitudes towards Muslims in France. This rise in tolerance has not stopped the Front National/Rassemblement National from gaining high scores in successive elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019 (Mayer 2018). The results are less clear in 2020 and 2021 but a year before the presidential election Marine Le Pen remained quite high in the opinion polls. Of course, Rassemblement National voters are only a fraction of the electorate and they are not representative of the whole of French society, particularly when one considers levels of prejudices or of tolerance. In effect, long-term forces—such as rising level of education and generational replacement—are favourable to openness. Furthermore, the evolutions of the Longitudinal Index of Tolerance demonstrates that a xenophobic discourse can be countered effectively, including after large-scale terrorist attacks. The meaning given to an attack, jihadist or otherwise, is always open to skirmishes of interpretations and no political actor is guaranteed to have the upper hand. Despite the unprecedented visibility acquired in the media space by arguments denouncing ‘political correctness’ or the ‘great replacement’—the fear of immigrants replacing ‘native’ French people—the battle to establish the dominance of one’s frame is never won in advance by the extreme-right and its leaders. The articulation and the promotion of tolerant frames make it possible to resist the rise of ethnocentrism at the level of the polity. This is a lesson that advocates of a tolerant and multicultural society should bear in mind.

References Adorno, T., B. Frenkel, D. Levinson, and N. Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row. Alwin, D., and J. Krosnick. 1991. Aging, Cohorts, and the Stability of Sociopolitical Orientations over the Life Span. American Journal of Sociology 97 (1): 169–195. Inglehart, R. 2008. Changing Values Among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006. West European Politics 31 (1–2): 130–146. Iyengar, S., and D. Kinder. 1987. News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Kellstedt, P. 2003. The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9

IN PEOPLE’S MINDS: AN AUTHORITARIAN …

105

Mayer, N. 2018. The Radical Right in France. In The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, ed. J. Rydgren, 433–451. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayer, N., G. Michelat, V. Tiberj, and T. Vitale. 2017. Évolutions et structure des préjugés: le regard des chercheurs. In La lutte contre le racisme et la xénophobie 2015, ed. CNCDH, 63–140. Paris: La Documentation Française. Mayer, N., and V. Tiberj. 2016. Who Were the ‘Charlie’ in the Streets? A SocioPolitical Approach of the January 11 Rallies. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 59–68. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.63. Rouban, L. 2015. Qui sont les manifestants du 11 janvier 2015? Baromètre de la confiance politique 6bis. Sciences Po—CEVIPOF. http://www.cevipof.com/ rtefiles/File/barometre%20confiance/Confiance%20politique%20_%20Note% 20ROUBAN_Manifestants.pdf. Smith, C. 2013. Anti-Islamic Sentiment and Media Framing during the 9/11 Decade. Journal of Religion and Society 15: 1–15. Sniderman, P., L. Hagendoorn, and M. Prior. 2004. Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities. American Political Science Review 98 (1): 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00 0305540400098X. Stenner, K. 2005. The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stimson, J., V. Tiberj, and C. Thiebaut. 2010. Le mood, un nouvel instrument au service de l’analyse dynamique des opinions: application aux évolutions de la xénophobie en France (1999–2009). Revue française de science politique 60 (5): 901–926. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfsp.605.0901. Tiberj, V. 2008. La Crispation hexagonale: France fermée contre France plurielle, 2001–2007 . Paris: Plon. ———. 2017. Running to Stand Still. The Left-right Divide in France in 2017. Revue française de science politique 67 (6): 1089–1112. https://doi.org/10. 3917/rfsp.676.1089. Todd, E. 2015. Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tourangeau, R., K. Rasinski, N. Bradburn, and R. D’Andrade. 1989. Carry-over Effects in Attitude Survey. The Public Opinion Quarterly 53 (4): 495–524. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks, trans. A. Brown. Cambridge: Polity Press. Zaller, J. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zerhouni, O., M. Rougier, and D. Muller. 2016. ‘Who (Really) Is Charlie?’ French Cities with Lower Implicit Prejudice Toward Arabs Demonstrated Larger Participation Rates in Charlie Hebdo Rallies. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 69–76. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.50.

CHAPTER 10

Social Sciences in a Time of Terror Gérôme Truc

Abstract Terrorist attacks are moments when social life gets carried away. They are not conducive to reflection or to critical distance. For this reason, in such circumstances, the social sciences are sometimes deemed unnecessary and irrelevant, if not downright suspect. This concluding chapter argues that, contrary to such views, social sciences can help take a step back from what is happening to us, individually and collectively, when we are in the grip of a terrorist attack, and react to events with discernment. Gérôme Truc draws on the concepts of the post-attack ‘hysteria zone’ (R. Collins) and ‘moral panics’ (S. Cohen) to put into perspective two false polemics which agitated France in recent years: the first focused on the so-called sociological excuses (after the attacks of 13 November 2015) and the second on the burkini (after the attack in Nice in July 2016).

G. Truc (B) CNRS, Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5_10

107

108

G. TRUC

Keywords Social sciences (usefulness of) · Terrorist attacks · Moral panics · ‘Sociological excuses’ · French Burkini case · Social resilience

Terrorist attacks are moments when social life gets carried away. They are not conducive to reflection or to critical distance. On the contrary, they stir up fears and inflame minds. Everyone is called upon to choose their side, to say whether they are for or against the terrorists. There isn’t much room for nuance: the debates around the slogan Je suis Charlie in 2015 illustrated this well (Titley et al. 2017; Della Porta et al. 2020). In such circumstances, the social sciences are sometimes deemed unnecessary and irrelevant, if not downright suspect. After all, what good can sociologists or anthropologists do in times of terror? We have no use for their analyses and all their other verbiage; it is time for retaliation and action, and we need to confront the enemy attacking us. This is what we heard in the United States after 11 September (see for instance Cumings 2002), and again in France in recent years: for example, after the attacks of 13 November 2015, Manuel Valls, the then Prime Minister, castigated those seeking to find so-called ‘sociological excuses’ for the terrorists; and, more recently, after an Islamist murdered a teacher of history and geography, Samuel Paty, the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, openly attacked ‘Islamo-leftist’ academics, who in his view were guilty of ‘intellectual complicity’ with terrorists. These moments when everyone gets carried away are particularly trying and dangerous for the societies that are confronted with them—especially when they are reproduced at short intervals, as it has been the case in France since 2015. Their repetition makes us resemble the fishermen that Edgar Allan Poe describes in his short story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’: overwhelmed by emotion, unable to step back, we can’t stop staring into the heart of the whirlpool. In a lecture inspired by this story, the German sociologist Norbert Elias pointed out in the early 1980s that human beings still have to accomplish in the social and political sphere what they have been able to achieve in relation to nature (Elias 2007). For centuries, nature inspired terror and fascination in us; unable to distance ourselves from it, we could not control its dangers, such as storms or earthquakes. This, in turn, merely reinforced our fears and beliefs, until the development of scientific knowledge helped us to view these natural phenomena in a calm and rational way. This is largely what remains to be

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

109

done for social phenomena, and in particular for terrorism. And thus, for doing so, it is more social sciences that we need, and not less ! The social sciences allow us to understand what happens to us, individually and collectively, when we are in the grip of a terrorist attack, and to take a step back from the social processes that this attack sets in motion. They help us to stay reasonable, to react with discernment to aggression and thus avoid falling into the trap of the terrorists, who are seeking to weaken the society they strike by sowing discord and panic. In other words, the social sciences are an indispensable lifeline in times of terror, and therefore an essential factor in what has now come to be called our capacity for ‘resilience’ in the face of terrorism. Each in its own way, the preceding chapters have demonstrated this by challenging preconceived ideas that usually contribute to fuelling the maelstrom. No, ‘run for your lives!’ and ‘every man for himself!’ are not necessarily the rule in the face of a terrorist attack: Guillaume Dezecache shows, on the contrary, that it was examples of mutual aid and solidarity that prevailed among people trapped in the Bataclan on 13 November 2015. No, the wave of emotion aroused within the population by an attack does not stem from a pure and simple feeling that everyone belongs to the country affected, a feeling that then would give rise to a unanimous and unequivocal sense of indignation. As Maëlle Bazin reminds us, the ‘grassroots memorials’ testify to the fact that the springs of collective mourning are more subtle and complex, and Sébastien Ledoux’s study of schools and Romain Badouard’s investigation into social networks also encourage us to produce a more finely grained sociological account. No, we cannot speak of a ‘Muslim silence’ in the face of the Islamist attacks: Vincent Geisser shows, on the contrary, how much the Muslims of France, in spite of what is commonly said, were involved in the collective reaction triggered by the terrorist attacks of January and November 2015, and those in Nice in July 2016. No, the media are not just a passive echo chamber for terrorist attacks: Claire Sécail and Pierre Lefébure emphasise that journalists are fully aware of and concerned about the responsibilities weighing on them in such circumstances. And no, these events do not produce, in an almost magical way, a ‘patriotic reflex’ in the population, nor do they necessarily play into the hands of the extreme right: Laurie Boussaguet, Florence Faucher and Vincent Tiberj all highlight the decisive role played here by the reaction of the ruling elites, the symbols they mobilise, the words they use and the measures they take.

110

G. TRUC

Here, at the end of this book, I would like to flesh out the demonstration in two stages, showing how the social sciences allow us to put into perspective two false polemics which have agitated France following the attacks in recent years: the polemic on the so-called sociological excuses after the attacks of 13 November 2015; and the polemic on the burkini, in the summer of 2016, in the aftermath of the Nice attack.1

‘Sociological Excuses’: An Emblematic Post-Attacks Controversy Two weeks after the attacks of 13 November 2015, Manuel Valls, then French Prime Minister, declared to the Senate: ‘I’ve had enough of those who are constantly looking for excuses or cultural or sociological explanations for what has happened’. A little over a month later, at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the January 2015 attacks, he added: ‘There can be no valid explanation. To explain something is already to some degree to try and find an excuse for it’. There then followed a public controversy over ‘sociological excuses’ and the legitimacy of a sociological analysis of terrorism, if not the legitimacy of all sociological analysis in general. While such a controversy is not in itself new (one could say that it is as old as sociology…), the context in which it was reactivated at the end of 2015, and the beginning of 2016 was highly singular, even unprecedented. Never before had France experienced such a succession of major attacks in the space of ten months. Thus, Manuel Valls made his second statement, the one that sparked the controversy, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the attack on the Hyper Cacher at the Porte de Vincennes on 9 January 2016; at that time, less than two months had elapsed since the attacks of 13 November 2015. French society was then still in that particular post-attack period that sociologist Randall Collins describes as a ‘hysteria zone’ (Collins 2004). Based on a series of observations made in the United States following the 11 September attacks, Collins showed that a society confronted with a major terrorist attack goes through four successive phases: first a brief moment of ‘shock’ pure and simple, where there is a proliferation of somewhat chaotic individual reactions; then one or two weeks when, based around a few symbols,

1 This is the revised version of a text previously published in French in Rebuschi and Voléry (2019).

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

111

public demonstrations of solidarity with the victims emerge and stabilise (the American flag after 11 September, the slogan Je suis Charlie after the Charlie Hebdo attack, etc.), followed by two or three months of a ‘plateau’ where the unifying effect of these symbols reaches its highest level (which corresponds to the ‘hysteria zone’); then, finally, a gradual return to normal, taking six to nine months. The ‘hysteria zone’ is a period when people are on edge and social life is, as it were, over-revving. Social cohesion and patriotism are asserted more intensely than usual (more people display a flag at their window or on the porch of their house, e.g.), but social tensions are also more exacerbated: these are the two sides of the same coin. People are called upon to take a stand, and all those who do not expressly evoke solidarity with the victims will soon find themselves accused of sympathy for the terrorists. It is therefore also a time when the social body falls prey to turmoil, effervescence and vulnerability—a time conducive to new attacks by isolated individuals inspired by the latest events. These include the letters containing anthrax sent in the United States after 11 September; a knife attack on soldiers on duty outside a Jewish community centre in Nice after the January 2015 attacks; and, after the terrorist attacks of 13 November, a young man who crashed his car into a sentry patrol in Valence on 1 January 2016, and an attack on the 18th arrondissement police station in Paris six days later. We also observe unfounded panics (such as a crowd surge that injured several people in Juan-les-Pins, near Nice, a month after the attack of 14 July 2016, following a noise interpreted by several people as a shooting), and countless false alarms: the number of suspicious packages found on public transport in the Paris region and needing to be processed by specialised forces increased twofold after the attacks of January 2015 and fourfold after those of 13 November.2 When they follow an Islamist attack, these hysteria zones are also characterised by an upsurge in racist and Islamophobic acts in the form

2 Source: RATP. See also, in connection with the period after the attacks in Nice and Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Richard Schittly, ‘Dans le contexte terroriste, plus d’incidents et de fausses alertes’, Le Monde, 9 August 2016: https://www.lemonde.fr/police-jus tice/article/2016/08/09/le-contexte-terroriste-suscite-de-droles-de-passages-a-l-acte_4 980086_1653578.html.

112

G. TRUC

of ‘reprisals’.3 Regardless of how they are counted, these acts clearly increased in number in France following the 2015 attacks.4 The Collective against Islamophobia in France estimated that from 1 January to 18 June 2015, physical attacks on Muslims (resulting in at least a week’s total incapacity for work) and verbal attacks increased by 500% and 100%, respectively,5 while the Interministerial Delegation for the Fight against Racism and Anti-Semitism measured a 200% increase in anti-Muslim acts over the year as a whole.6 But the phenomenon is always sporadic. While some in France accused it of ‘inflating’ the figures to serve its cause, the Collective against Islamophobia in France concluded that Islamophobic acts had returned in 2018 to their 2012 level, after having fallen sharply in 2016,7 just as, among other examples, the resurgence of these acts observed in the United Kingdom following the attacks of 7 July 2005 in London subsided very quickly.8 So all these phenomena are transient— but they still leave traces in the societies concerned. And they can also spiral up out of control, especially when periods of this type are repeated at short intervals. ‘Hysteria zones’, as Randall Collins points out, always risk giving rise to outbursts of violence (Collins 2004, pp. 84–86)— such as the scenes observed in Ajaccio a little over a month after the 13 November attacks when a Muslim prayer room was sacked to cries of

3 This phenomenon stems from the radicalisation of certain isolated individuals, whose racist convictions pre-exist the attacks. It does not really reflect any change in the general population’s attitudes towards minorities, as Vincent Tiberj shows in his chapter. 4 On the problems involved in counting Islamophobic acts in France, like anti-Semitic acts, see Maxime Vaudano, ‘Actes antisémites et islamophobes: un décompte délicat à établir’, Le Monde, 12 February 2019: https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/ 2019/02/12/actes-antisemites-et-islamophobes-un-decompte-hasardeux_5422565_4355 770.html. 5 Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, Rapport sur l’islamophobie en France six mois après les attentats de janvier 2015, Saint-Ouen, 2015, p. 14. 6 ‘Racisme: l’inquiétante augmentation des actes anti-islam’, Le Parisien, 30 December 2015: http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/racisme-l-inquietante-augmentation-des-actesanti-islam-30-12-2015-5409853.php. 7 Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France, Rapport sur l’islamophobie pendant l’année 2017: dates, chiffres et questions, Saint-Ouen, 2018, p. 16. 8 Europe Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, The Impact of 7 July 2005 London Bomb Attacks on Muslim Communities on the EU, November 2005: https://fra. europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/197-london-bomb-attacks_en.pdf.

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

113

‘They must be killed!’9 In fact, when we go through such periods, we are literally in the middle of the maelstrom, always in danger of being collectively swept away by the whirlwind. It is in the context of this highly specific kind of social turmoil that the controversy over ‘sociological excuses’ must be replaced. M. Valls made his first statement at the very beginning of the hysteria zone following 13 November, and his second statement right in the middle of it. Both reflected the spirit of that period: it was no time for scientific analyses, for contradictory debates on the causes of terrorism, or for sociological quibbles, but for action. There was a need to act and react: to hunt down and arrest the culprits, restore order and security, display the nation’s mourning. This is why the Prime Minister initially declared that he had ‘had enough’ of those who were ‘constantly’ seeking excuses or explanations… He was expressing something akin to a righteous anger in the face of a scientific discourse that appeared unseemly, not so much in general as at this particular moment in social life when, according to him, it should stay silent. It is difficult to know whether this anger was genuine or not. In all likelihood, M. Valls was here taking on the role that he considered the most suitable for the situation, one which he probably thought would provide him with a political pay-off. A year and a half later, in a ‘calmer’ frame of mind, he would justify his words in an interview with Libération, while regretting the way he had formulated his thoughts: ‘Of course I was wrong to say that we should not look for the cause - we do have to look for one. But first, we must condemn’.10 Even if M. Valls himself therefore admitted, after the event, that he had been wrong to formulate things in this way, the fact remains that, when he did formulate them, his statements were not a one-off slip of the tongue, but rather part of the logic of the post-attack situation in which he found himself caught. If at the time he had regretted his initial outburst against ‘sociological excuses’, he could very well have rephrased things, qualifying his remarks on the occasion of the commemorative ceremonies of the January 2015 attacks. Instead of that, he drove the point home, proclaiming during the 9 Aude Loriaux, ‘“Il faut les tuer!”: à Ajaccio, les slogans anti-musulmans atteignent des sommets de haine’, Slate, 26 December 2015: http://www.slate.fr/story/111947/ ajaccio-les-slogans-anti-musulmans-atteignent-des-sommets-de-haine. 10 ‘Manuel Valls par Christine Angot: “Je ne suis pas romantique”’, Libération, 26 June 2017: https://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2017/06/26/manuel-valls-par-christ ine-angot-je-ne-suis-pas-romantique_1579641 (my emphasis).

114

G. TRUC

tribute to the victims of the Hyper Cacher that ‘there can be no valid explanation’—which, with regard to the first statement, is akin to making it more general. Deliberately or not, he therefore seems to have become caught up in the maelstrom, rather than leading by example by stepping back from the situation. In this, the position adopted by M. Valls after 13 November is reminiscent of the Manichean language deployed in the United States after 11 September (Simko 2015). Like that language, it was underpinned by a binary opposition—one which he made explicit when he came to regret the way he had initially expressed himself—between (political) action and (sociological) analysis, or, to use his terms, between a condemnation of terrorist action and an attempt to uncover its causes. But why, after all, should the two be mutually exclusive? Why might understanding the causes of a terrorist attack not shed light on the political response to this attack? Surely the condemnation of a terrorist act could be all the more effective when it is expressed with discernment, without falling into antisociologism? In fact, there is currently in the social sciences a whole body of established knowledge not only relating to the causes of terrorist acts, but also to their effects and their impact on the societies confronted with them (Spilerman and Stecklov 2009; Truc 2019)—knowledge that is very directly useful for understanding what happens to us collectively in such circumstances and that can help us cope with it more intelligently.

The Burkini Affair: A Typical Case of ‘moral Panic’ In spite of what is often said, when a terrorist attack occurs, social scientists do not simply have the choice of waiting silently in their offices until things blow over or else deciding to change jobs and join the police, army or intelligence services. They can also continue to do their work and do it usefully. This book itself attests to this. If, as we have just seen, Randall Collins was able to specify the different phases through which a society passes after a terrorist attack, this is because, just four days after 11 September, he began to collect data and to make observations that would help him objectify the process then at work in American society (Collins 2004). Likewise, shortly after the 13 November attacks, Sarah Gensburger, a sociologist living near the Bataclan and the main sites that were attacked, decided to conduct a day-to-day survey in her neighbourhood, both so as to put her own feelings into perspective—in a very Norbert Elias-type gesture of distancing herself from the post-attacks

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

115

maelstrom, and to study the effects of the terrorist attacks on a local scale that is all too rarely taken into consideration (Gensburger 2019). That one can thus, almost immediately after an attack and while the dead are still being counted, engage in research work can obviously cause offence, even among other social scientists.11 The fact is that, in the face of a terrorist attack, researchers themselves first react in a visceral, skindeep manner, like everyone else: as citizens and members of the affected society, they too can be stunned, concerned, upset, etc. The French sociologist Stéphane Beaud testifies to this in La France des Belhoumi, in connection with the attack on the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo: ‘I do not hesitate to admit that I myself was “caught up” in the event and that I too felt an enormous shock, a very great sadness […]. In short, it took me a while to “get a grip on myself,” to return to my profession as a sociologist, to try to connect “History” with a capital “H” (the attacks) and “history” with a small “h” (the story of the Belhoumi family), the macro- and micro-levels, etc. That is, to get back to investigating the situation as it affected the brothers and sisters of the family’ (Beaud 2018, pp. 269–270). To ‘get a grip on himself’ and ‘return to his profession’, the sociologist had to take a step back from his emotions and his own relationship to the event. But if he did not do this, who would? For this, he can count on his knowledge—of pre-existing research, theories, concepts—but also on his know-how: research methods and the ‘tricks’ of the trade, as Howard Becker calls them (Becker 1998). Such expertise, more than ever in post-attack situations, deserves to be placed at the service of the collective so as to forestall the dangers inherent in these situations. Finally, I would like to give another example, the so-called Burkini Affair, which shook France during the post-Nice attack hysteria zone, in the summer of 2016. In the middle of August 2016, just one month after the Nice attack (and two weeks after the slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel in SaintEtienne-du-Rouvray’s church), several French municipalities issued a series of decrees banning the wearing of the burkini on their beaches, citing the risk of disturbances to public order that this bathing suit would

11 Thus, one of the reviewers of a research project in which I am currently participating, using questionnaires to gauge reactions to terrorist attacks, felt it was ‘indecent’ that we could feel that a ‘flash’ module of this questionnaire, administered online to a sample of the French population, could be activated in the event of a new attack in France while the survey was being carried out. The idea of this module was therefore abandoned.

116

G. TRUC

represent. The first to do so was the city of Cannes, on 11 August, quickly followed in the space of a week by almost all the towns in the AlpesMaritimes with beaches (with the exception of Antibes) and a handful of others across France. The brawl on 13 August in Sisco, Corsica, between a Maghrebi family from Bastia who had ‘privatised’ part of the beach and young people from the village—a brawl which left five wounded—had the effect of a catalyst. Immediately, rumours began to circulate on social networks and in the media: the Maghreb women were said to have worn burkinis and the men had shouted ‘Allah Akbar!’ The police investigation quickly established that this was not so, but nonetheless, several mayors of coastal municipalities saw it as confirmation that the burkini did indeed represent a danger justifying their decrees. Finally, on 26 August 2016, the Council of State issued an ordinance which invalidated the decree passed in Villeneuve-Loubet—establishing at the same time a case law for similar municipal decrees—on the grounds that no fact establishing a link between the wearing of a burkini and a disturbance of public order had been noted in this commune. But in the meantime, this wave of decrees had been widely publicised and debated, including abroad, prompting people to voice an opinion all the way up to the highest echelons of the state, in the person of… Manuel Valls himself, who as Prime Minister on several occasions voiced his support for those mayors who had banned the burkini on their beaches (Kaufmann 2017, pp. 9–28, 73–77). The affair was drawing to a close when the sociologist Michel Wieviorka published an article in which he analysed it as a typical case of ‘moral panic’ in a post-attack context (Wieviorka 2016). He was obviously right. The concept of ‘moral panic’, now widespread in sociology, was coined by Stanley Cohen in the early 1970s to account for the disproportionate reactions that can be triggered by certain facts or events amplified and dramatised by the media, and therefore perceived by a number of people as a threat to society (Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009; Cree et al. 2016). We here find all of its characteristics, in particular the role played in this process by ‘moral entrepreneurs’ (Becker 1963), who seize on what are in themselves minor facts—here the wearing of the burkini— to convince the public and the authorities to act against the threat they supposedly represent (here, the elected representatives of the right and far-right and the supporters of a Republic that is ‘uncompromising’ in the face of Islam, such as Manuel Valls), and the role of the media which, in their sensationalist treatment of the brawl at Cisco, amplified the movement of moral panic. The analysis was subsequently broadened and

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

117

deepened by Jean-Claude Kaufmann in a short book, Burkini: autopsie d’un fait divers (Burkini: the autopsy of a news item), published in spring 2017 (Kaufmann 2017). Kaufmann shows that, if the moral panic aroused by the burkini had grown to such an extent, this was also due to a particular combination of structural and situational factors. He situates it both in relation to the long-term evolution of behavioural norms and the relationship to women’s bodies on French beaches, a subject in which he is a specialist (Kaufmann 1995), and in relation to a series of previous cases that had prepared the ground: the ‘Reims swimsuit’ affair in August 2015, that of the ‘Gennevilliers skirt’ in April 2016, and that of the ‘Toulon shorts’ in June 2016. On each of these occasions, the assault on a woman on the public highway in connection with her costume gave rise to a media storm denouncing a ‘new morality police’ or a ‘sartorial terror’ supposedly exercised by Islamists in France, before the judicial investigation quickly established that the assault had in fact no religious motive. Last but not least, Kaufmann ends by emphasising the weight of the postNice attack social climate, conducive to ‘hysterical’ reactions within the population and to a ‘collective blindness’ that ‘led to the promulgation of prohibitions where they should never have been made’ (Kaufmann 2017, p. 44). ‘In the emotional heat of the moment’, he remarks, ‘the processes at work [are] not identified’ (Kaufmann 2017, p. 68). In fact, French society then seemed to be totally trapped in the maelstrom, letting itself be carried away until it was seized with (moral) panic.

For a Popular Culture in the Social Sciences Without denying the significance of the affair, the social sciences therefore help us interpret the mechanisms and processes from which it arose and those that ensued from it. Here as elsewhere, the affair can be explained in ways that are not, however, excuses for the error made by elected officials and political leaders who, through their anti-burkini decrees, exceeded the law, or, through their support for these decrees, fuelled the moral panic, when they might be expected in such circumstances to be reasonable and lead by example. The concern, however, is that sociological analysis, as we also see in the present case, usually comes after the fact—after the damage is done, in short. And this analysis finds few echoes: who in France knows these texts by Wieviorka and Kaufmann, unless they are sociologists by profession, secondary school teachers, sociology students or ‘amateurs’ of the social sciences? Ultimately, the question posed by the burkini affair,

118

G. TRUC

like the controversy over ‘sociological excuses’, is also the question of the dissemination within our societies of a popular culture in the social sciences capable of serving as a safeguard in post-attack situations (and other socially perilous circumstances of the same type), in the sense that it would enable us to react to them immediately, in the very moment we are confronted with them, with more critical distance and intelligence. Just as meteorological knowledge enables navigators to avoid storms or face them as best as possible, knowledge produced by the social sciences should help us navigate times of terror as calmly as possible, and in this way be more ‘resilient’ in the face of terrorist attacks. It was the very purpose of this book to demonstrate this much. We saw again in this last chapter how this knowledge makes it possible to objectify the phenomena of the hysterical turn taken by social life, the emotional outbursts and moral panic to which these situations expose us, even when social sciences find themselves taken to task, as in the case of the controversy over ‘sociological excuses’. But for these sciences to be able to help us to cope more intelligently with terrorist attacks, to the full extent of their means and therefore more effectively, the knowledge that emerges from them must be better disseminated within society, and not kept as the preserve of a community of scholars. This is an issue for schools and universities as well as for the media. May this book help.

References Beaud, S. 2018. La France des Belhoumi: Portraits de famille (1977–2017). Paris: La Découverte. Becker, H.S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press Glencoe. ______. 1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About your Research while You’re Doing it. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cohen, S. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of the mods and rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee Ltd. Collins, R. 2004. Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist Attack. Sociological Theory 22 (1): 53–87. Cree, V.E., G. Clapton, and M. Smith, eds. 2016. Revisiting Moral Panics. Bristol: Policy Press. Cumings, B. 2002. Black September, Infantile Nihilism, and National Security. In Understanding September 11, ed. C. Calhoun, P. Price, and A. Timmer, 198–211. New York: New Press.

10

SOCIAL SCIENCES IN A TIME OF TERROR

119

Della Porta, D., P.C. Gattinara, K. Eleftheriadis, and A. Felicetti, eds. 2020. Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures: Debating Citizenship after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Elias, N. 2007. The Fishermen in the Maelstrom. In Involvement and Detachment, revised edition, 105–178. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. Gensburger, S. 2019. Memory on My Doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan Neighborhood, Paris, 2015–2016. Louvain: Leuven University Press. Goode, E., N. Ben-Yehuda, and 2009, 1994. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell. Kaufmann, J.-C. 1995. Corps de femmes, regards d’hommes: Sociologie des seins nus. Paris: Nathan. ______. 2017. Burkini, autopsie d’un fait divers. Paris: Les liens qui libèrent. Rebuschi, M. and I. Voléry, eds. 2019. Comprendre, expliquer, est-ce excuser ? Plaidoyer pour les sciences humaines et sociales. Vulaines-sur-Seine: Éditions du Croquant. Simko, C. 2015. The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spilerman, S. and G. Stecklov. 2009. Societal Responses to Terrorist Attacks. Annual Review of Sociology 35 (1): 167–189. https://doi.org/10.1146/ann urev-soc-070308-120001 Titley, G., D. Freedman, G. Khiabany, and A. Mondon, eds. 2017. After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech. London: Zed Books. Truc, G. 2019. What Terror Attacks do to Societies: Fieldwork and Case Studies. Ethnologie Française‚ 173: 5–19. https://doi.org/10.3917/ethn.191.0005 Wieviorka, M. 2016. Panique morale autour du ‘burkini’, The Conversation, 26 August. https://theconversation.com/panique-morale-autour-du-burkini64410

References

Antichan, S. 2017. Comment étudier les pratiques mémorielles liées aux attentats? Plaidoyer pour des sciences sociales ordinaires. Genèses 109 (4): 139–156. https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.109.0139. Badouard, R. 2019. Être ou ne pas être “Charlie.” Débattre Des Attentats Sur La Page Facebook D’un Média Musulman’, Sciences De La Socieété 102: 111–133. https://doi.org/10.4000/sds.7150. Bajrafil, M. 2018. Réveillons-nous ! Lettre à un jeune Français musulman. Paris: édition Plein du Jour. Bazin, M. 2018. Peuples en larmes, peuples en marches: La médiatisation des affects lors des attentats de janvier 2015. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118 (3): 75–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/mots.23653. Bazin, M., G. Ferragu, and C. Sécail (eds.) 2019. Special issue: L’attentat, du tyrannicide au terrorisme. Le Temps des médias 32(1). Boin, A., P. Hart, P.C. Stern, and B. Sundelius. 2017. The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boussaguet, L., and F. Faucher. 2017. Quand l’État convoque la rue: La marche républicaine du 11 janvier 2015. Gouvernement Et Action Publique 6 (2): 37–61. https://doi.org/10.3917/gap.172.0037. ———. 2018. La construction des discours présidentiels post-attentats à l’épreuve du temps. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118: 95–115. https:// doi.org/10.4000/mots.23867.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5

121

122

REFERENCES

———. 2020. Beyond a ‘Gesture’: The Treatment of the Symbolic in Public Policy Analysis. French Politics 18 (1–2): 189–205. https://doi.org/10. 1057/s41253-020-00107-9. Brody, R. 1991. Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion and Public Support. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Charrihi, H. 2017. Ma mère patrie: face aux attentats restons unis. Paris: éditions de La Martinière. Chenoweth, E., R. English, A. Gofas, and S.N. Kalyvas, eds. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chowanietz, C. 2016. Bombs, Bullets, and Politicians: France’s Response to Terrorism. Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press. Closs Stephens, A., and N. Vaughan-Williams, eds. 2009. Terrorism and the Politics of Response. New York and London: Routledge. Cohen, M. 2008. Les déclinaisons historiques du franco-judaïsme et ses critiques contemporaines. Archives De Sciences Sociales Des Religions 144: 141–161. Collins, R. 2004. Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist Attack. Sociological Theory 22 (1): 53–87. Cree, V.E., G. Clapton, and M. Smith, eds. 2016. Revisiting Moral Panics. Bristol: Policy Press. Dancel, B. 2002. Enseigner l’histoire de la grande guerre et commémorer l’armistice du 11 novembre à l’école primaire. Carrefours De L’éducation 13: 18–49. Dayan, D. (ed.) 2006. La terreur spectacle: terrorisme et télévision. Louvain-laNeuve: De Boeck. Dazey, M. 2019. Les conditions de production locale d’un islam respectable. Genèses 117 (4): 74–93. https://doi.org/10.3917/gen.117.0074. Della Porta, D., P.C. Gattinara, K. Eleftheriadis, and A. Felicetti, eds. 2020. Discursive Turns and Critical Junctures: Debating Citizenship after the Charlie Hebdo Attacks. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Dezecache, G. 2015. Human Collective Reactions to Threat. Wires Cognitive Science 6 (3): 209–219. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1344. Dezecache, G., J.-R. Martin, C. Tessier, L. Safra, V. Pitron, P. Nuss, and J. Grèzes. 2020. Nature and Determinants of Social Actions during a Mass Shooting. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dk5ah. Doss, E. 2008. The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials. Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Fahy, R. F., and G. Proulx. 2005. Analysis of Published Accounts of the World Trade Center Evacuation. Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster. National Construction Safety Team Act Reports, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD.

REFERENCES

123

Faucher, F., and L. Boussaguet. 2018. The Politics of Symbols: Reflections on the French Government’s Framing of the 2015 Terrorist Attacks. Parliamentary Affairs 71 (1): 169–195. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsx013. Fourquet, J., and N. Lebourg. 2017. La nouvelle guerre d’Algérie n’aura pas lieu. Paris: Fondation Jean Jaurès. Frouard, H. 2020. Un monument de papier: Les registres de condoléances de la mairie du 11e arrondissement. In Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre, ed. S. Gensburger and G. Truc, 173–191. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Garcia, D., and B. Rimé. 2019. Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack. Psychological Science 30 (4): 617–628. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619831964. Garcin-Marrou, I. 2001. Terrorisme, médias et démocratie. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Garcin-Marou, I., and I. Hare. 2019. Presse écrite et événement terroriste: Routines narratives et émergence de la société civile (1995–2016). Le Temps Des Medias 32: 153–169. https://doi.org/10.3917/tdm.032.0153. Geisser, V. 2020. Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?, The New York Times, 21 October. Geisser, V., O. Marongiu-Perria, and K. Smaïl. 2017. Musulmans de France, la grande épreuve. Ivry-sur-Seine: Les éditions de l’atelier. Gensburger, S. 2019. Memory on my doorstep: Chronicles of the Bataclan neighborhood, Paris 2015–2016. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Gensburger, S. and G. Truc (eds.) 2020. Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre. Paris, Éditions de l’EHESS. Goffman, E. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. Goode, E., N. Ben-Yehuda, and 2009, 1994. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell. Hadjab, W. 2015. Les musulmans français se manifestent pour protéger leur citoyenneté et le sens de leur sacré. Zaman France, November 26. Hoffman, B. 2017. Inside Terrorism, 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Iacobucci, E.M., and S.J. Toope, eds. 2015. After the Paris Attacks: Responses in Canada, Europe, and Around the Globe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Innes, M., C. Roberts, A. Preece, and D. Rogers. 2018. Ten ‘Rs’ of Social Reaction : Using Social Media to Analyse the ‘Post-event’ Impacts of the Murder of Lee Rigby. Terrorism and Political Violence 30 (3): 454–474. https://doi. org/10.1080/09546553.2016.1180289. Johnson, N.R. 1987. Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order: Popular Myth, Social Theory. Empirical Evidence. Sociological Focus 20 (3): 171–183.

124

REFERENCES

Jones, N.M., R.R. Thompson, C. Dunkel Schetter, and R. Cohen Silver. 2017. Distress and Rumor Exposure on Social Media during a Campus Lockdown. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (44): 11663–11668. Kavoori, A. P., and T. Fraley (eds.) 2006. Media, Terrorism, and Theory: a Reader. Lanham/Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield. Lagadec, P., L. Le Gall, J.-F. Simon, and M. Thomas. 2019. Passage à l’acte: Arborer un drapeau tricolore après les attentats du 13-Novembre (Brest, 27 novembre 2015). Ethnologie Française 173: 45–62. https://doi.org/10. 3917/ethn.191.0045. Ledoux, S. 2016. Le Devoir de mémoire: Une formule et son histoire. Paris: CNRS Éditions. ———. 2017. L’École à l’épreuve de l’attentat de Charlie Hebdo: Quand les minutes de silence parlent aussi. Mémoires En Jeu 4: 65–71. Lefébure, P., and C. Sécail (eds.) 2016. Le défi Charlie: les médias à l’épreuve des attentats. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Free access: https://hal.archives-ouvertes. fr/hal-01273505. Lefébure, P., É. Roche, and C. Sécail. 2018. Les attentats du 13 novembre en direct à la télévision: Mise en récit de l’événement et de ses ramifications. Mots. Les Langages Du Politique 118: 37–57. https://doi.org/10. 4000/mots.23766. Mamoun, M. 2017. L’islam contre le radicalisme: manuel de contre-offensive. Paris: éditions du Cerf. Margry, P.J., and C. Sánchez-Carretero, eds. 2011. Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death. New York: Berghahn. Mauger, G. 2015. Sur les attentats des 7 et 9 janvier 2015. Savoir/agir 31: 81–88. https://doi.org/10.3917/sava.031.0081. Mayer, N., and V. Tiberj. 2016. Who Were the ‘Charlie’ in the Streets? A SocioPolitical Approach of the January 11 Rallies. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 59–68. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.63. Oubrou, T. 2019. Appel à la réconciliation! Foi musulmane et valeurs de la République française. Paris: Plon. Quarantelli, E.L. 1954. The Nature and Conditions of Panic. American Journal of Sociology 60 (3): 267–275. Raflik, J. 2016. Terrorisme et mondialisation: Approches historiques. Paris: Gallimard. Ratinaud, P., and N. Smyrnaios. 2016. The Web Sphere of #CharlieHebdo: A Network and Discours Analysis of a Political Controversy on Twitter. ESSACHESS Journal for Communication Studies 9 (2): 213–230. Saint-Fuscien, E. 2020. Au-delà de la minute de silence ? L’hommage aux morts des attentats de 2015 en milieu scolaire. Sensibilités 8: 78–88. https://doi. org/10.3917/sensi.008.0078.

REFERENCES

125

Santino, J., ed. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schnapper, D., C. Bordes-Benayoun, and F. Raphaël. 2009. La condition juive en France: La tentation de l’entre-soi. Paris: PUF. Sécail, C. 2016. L’histoire en marche (républicaine): l’information continue et “l’esprit du 11 janvier.” In Le Défi Charlie: Les médias à l’épreuve des attentats, ed. P. Lefébure and C. Sécail, 117–152. Paris: Lemieux éditeur. Sèze, R. 2015. Leaders musulmans et fabrication d’un “islam civil.” Confluences Méditerranée 95 (4): 43–58. https://doi.org/10.3917/come.095.0043. Silke, A. 2019. Routledge Handbook of Terrorism and Counterterrorism. London and New York: Routledge. Simko, C. 2015. The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, C. 2013. Anti-Islamic Sentiment and Media Framing during the 9/11 Decade. Journal of Religion and Society 15: 1–15. Sniderman, P., L. Hagendoorn, and M. Prior. 2004. Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities. American Political Science Review 98 (1): 35–49. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00 0305540400098X. Spilerman, S., and G. Stecklov. 2009. Societal Responses to Terrorist Attacks. Annual Review of Sociology 35: 167–189. Stampnizky, L. 2013. Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism.’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stenner, K. 2005. The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stimson, J., V. Tiberj, and C. Thiebaut. 2010. Le mood, un nouvel instrument au service de l’analyse dynamique des opinions: Application aux évolutions de la xénophobie en France (1999–2009). Revue Française De Science Politique 60 (5): 901–926. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfsp.605.0901. Tiberj, V. 2008. La Crispation hexagonale: France fermée contre France plurielle, 2001–2007 . Paris: Plon. Titley, G., D. Freedman, G. Khiabany, and A. Mondon, eds. 2017. After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech. London: Zed Books. Truc, G. 2017. Shell Shocked: The Social Response to Terrorist Attacks. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2019. What Terror Attacks do to Aocieties: Fieldwork and Case Studies. Ethnologie Française 173: 5–19. https://doi.org/10.3917/ethn.191.0005. ———. 2020. Ce que disent les messages du 13 novembre. In Les mémoriaux du 13 novembre, ed. S. Gensburger and G. Truc, 127–158. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Truc, G., and M. Bazin. 2019. Guardians of Memory: Mobilizations and Conflicts of Appropriation Surrounding Post-terrorist Attack Memorials in

126

REFERENCES

Madrid, London, and Paris. Ethnologie Française 173 (1): 63–75. https:// doi.org/10.3917/ethn.191.0063. Zerhouni, O., M. Rougier, and D. Muller. 2016. ‘Who (Really) is Charlie?’ French Cities with Lower Implicit Prejudice toward Arabs Demonstrated Larger Participation Rates in Charlie Hebdo Rallies. International Review of Social Psychology 29 (1): 69–76. https://doi.org/10.5334/irsp.50.

Index

A Acts, 19, 20, 26, 35, 37, 39, 70, 71, 74, 94, 111, 112, 114 Al-Qaeda, 36 Anti-Semitism, 57, 96, 112 Attacks 11 September 2001, 3, 16, 24, 25, 34, 56 Attacks of 13 November 2015, 2, 18, 59, 63, 72, 76, 98, 108, 110 Attacks of 14 July 2016, 38, 73, 111 Attacks of January 2015, 37, 38, 48, 49, 63, 77, 98, 110, 111, 113 Authoritarian(s), 8, 95–97 Authority/authorities, 4, 8, 28, 34, 35, 37–40, 43, 99, 103, 116

B Bataclan, 2, 6, 9, 14, 17–20, 25, 109, 114 Broadcasting, 35–41, 43 Bruno, Dellinger, 16, 17

C Caricatures, 58, 65 Cartoons, 49, 63, 71, 72, 75 Chaos, 15 Charlie Hebdo, 2, 3, 7, 25, 28, 48–51, 56–62, 65, 72, 75, 83, 84, 111, 115 Citizenship, 66, 70, 72, 76, 89 Collective, 4, 5, 7, 8, 18, 19, 24, 26, 29, 30, 41, 47, 48, 52, 61, 62, 71, 79, 88, 89, 99, 103, 109, 112, 115 Communication, 2, 34, 84–86, 89 Consensus, 87, 90 Conspiracy theory, 7, 46, 50, 51 Constitutional reform, 89 Controversy/controversies, 38, 39, 41, 50, 63, 85, 88, 110, 113, 118 Cooperation, 6, 19, 78 Crowd, 3, 14–17, 21, 87, 111

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Faucher and G. Truc (eds.), Facing Terrorism in France, French Politics, Society and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94163-5

127

128

INDEX

D Danger, 6, 9, 14–18, 20, 21, 64, 96, 113, 116 Debate, 8, 43, 46, 50, 58, 75, 78, 89, 97, 102, 103 Demonstration, 4, 25, 48, 61, 70, 72, 74, 95, 101, 110, 111

E Eagles of Death Metal, 14 Elite, 51, 74, 83, 94, 97, 109 Élysée, 83–86, 88, 89 Emotion, 2, 5, 7, 28, 30, 35, 43, 46–48, 52, 60, 62–65, 87, 108, 109, 115 Ethical, 34, 35, 40, 43, 50 Executive, 4, 8, 17, 34, 35, 83, 85–90 Extreme right, 8, 49, 109

F Fake news, 50 Flag, 27, 77, 83, 86, 88, 111 Forfeiture of nationality, 89, 90, 102, 104 Frames, 4, 101, 103, 104 Framing, 9, 64, 85, 94–97, 99, 103 Freedom of expression, 65, 74 French Council for Muslim Worship (CFCM), 72, 74, 75 French executive, 8

G Guardians of memory, 29

H Hollande, François, 2, 56, 83, 87, 89 Hugues, Jesse, 14 Human dignity, 35, 39, 41

I Image, 7, 27, 34, 35, 38, 41, 42, 48, 63, 70, 75, 78, 86, 87, 90 Imams, 73, 74 Individual, 3, 5–9, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 49, 51, 61, 65, 70, 71, 76, 78, 79, 88, 89, 95–97, 100, 101, 110, 111 Interior Minister, 8, 83 ISIS, 3, 35 Islamic, 3, 73, 77 Islamist terrorism, 70, 72 Islamo-leftism, 66, 108 Islamophobia, 49, 74, 112

J 11 January, 72, 87, 90, 95, 103 Je suis Charlie, 2, 48, 49, 63, 75, 76, 101, 108, 111 Je suis Nice, 52 Je suis Paris , 30 John, Drury, 17, 20 journalism, 50 Journalistic practices, 43 Journalists, 2, 7, 24, 27, 34–38, 40–43, 60, 62, 103, 109

L Leaders, 2, 5, 8, 24, 71, 73, 85, 88, 90, 96, 99, 103 Left, 49, 61, 73, 89, 95, 97, 102, 103, 116

M March, 24, 30, 36, 52, 57, 72, 87, 89, 90, 98, 102 Mass shooting, 14, 18 Media, 2, 4–8, 16, 24–27, 29, 36, 38–43, 46–51, 58, 60, 63, 65, 71, 84, 96, 104, 116, 118

INDEX

Media coverage, 2, 26, 27, 34–38, 43, 60, 62 Memorial, 4, 6, 24–31 Minute of silence, 56–58, 60–63, 65, 66 Mosque(s), Great Mosque of Paris, 77 Mourning, 24–27, 29–31, 46–48, 50, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74–76, 78, 86, 109, 113 Muslim Mobilisations, 70, 73 Muslim Organizations, 70–72, 74, 75, 77, 78 Muslim(s), 8, 9, 49, 58, 62, 65, 70–78, 83, 84, 94, 101, 109, 112 Mutual assistance, 16–20

N Narrative, 8, 18, 34, 49, 96 Nation, 5, 9, 56, 57, 60, 70, 78, 89, 103, 113 National Assembly, 37, 85, 87, 88 National education, 56, 63, 66, 108 News, 4, 5, 35, 36, 39–41, 43 Nice, 3, 7, 24, 25, 27, 29, 38, 42, 47, 70, 73, 74, 90, 98, 109–111, 115

O Opinion, 2, 4, 5, 8, 46, 48, 49, 51, 71, 78, 84–86, 89, 94–97, 103, 104, 116 Opposition, 46, 49, 82, 85, 90, 114

P Panic, 6, 9, 15, 16, 109, 116, 117 Paris, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 18, 24, 29, 58, 64, 73, 98, 111 Patriotic, 73, 74, 77, 82 Paty, Samuel, 65, 66, 70, 74, 108

129

Place de la République, 6, 25, 28, 29, 31 Political, 2–5, 8, 9, 24, 30, 34, 35, 39, 46, 49, 51, 58, 61, 63, 66, 71, 74, 75, 79, 83, 85, 88, 90, 96, 97, 99, 102–104, 108, 113, 114, 117 Political responses, 114 Politician, 2, 37, 70, 85, 94, 96 President, 8, 34, 36, 40, 56, 77, 82–87, 89, 103 Prime Minister, 8, 82, 83, 85–87, 90, 108, 113, 116 Propaganda, 34, 39, 41, 46 Public opinion, 8, 35, 46, 85, 86, 90, 94, 97 Public order, 37, 38, 115, 116 Public space, 5, 7, 25, 28, 29, 50, 70 Pupils, 7, 57–66, 75

R Racism, 50, 78, 94, 97, 103, 112 Rally, 77, 87 Randall, Collins, 9, 63, 110, 112, 114 Regulatory authority, 35, 37, 40, 43 Repetition, 2, 4, 24, 25, 31, 66, 82, 90, 108 Republican, 52, 59, 72–74, 76, 78, 87, 88, 97, 99 Resilience, 5, 8, 9, 30, 99, 109 Responses, 4, 7, 8, 17, 78, 96 Right, 40, 49, 57, 77, 88, 89, 102, 103, 113, 116 Risk, 9, 20, 35, 39, 49, 61, 62, 65, 83, 88, 112, 115 Ritual, 7–9, 25, 26, 30, 48, 56, 57, 59–62, 65 Roncin, Joachim, 48, 75, 76 Routine, 29, 78, 86, 90

130

INDEX

S Sarkozy, Nicolas, 52, 97, 103 School, 7, 25, 36, 56–65, 75, 109, 118 Slogan, 48, 49, 63, 75, 76, 88, 108, 111 Social media, 2, 4, 7, 27, 36, 42, 46–49, 58, 65, 84, 88 Social network, 24, 38, 42, 49, 50, 76, 83, 94, 109, 116 Social responses, 8 Social sciences, 9, 62, 83, 108–110, 114, 117, 118 Solidarity, 6, 8, 9, 28, 46, 47, 63, 64, 71, 74, 76, 77, 84, 109, 111 Speech, 57, 60, 62, 63, 66, 73, 85, 97, 103 Staging, 27, 61, 73, 87 Survival, 15, 18, 21 Survivors, 6, 7, 14, 16–18 Symbols, 27, 83, 86, 88–90, 109–111

T Teachers, 7, 57–63, 65, 66, 75, 87, 117 Television, 7, 25–27, 34, 35, 50 Terror, 5, 7, 84, 108, 109, 118 Terrorism, 3, 8, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 51, 65, 72, 74, 76, 109 Terrorist attacks, 7–9, 17, 18, 25, 27, 28, 34–36, 38, 43, 48, 52, 56, 64, 65, 71, 77, 94, 97, 98, 104, 108, 109, 111, 115, 118

Threat, 16, 18, 21, 43, 65, 84, 89, 116 Tolerance, 8, 9, 77, 94, 97–104 U United, 30, 40, 63, 75, 87, 112 United States, 24, 57, 82, 94, 97, 99, 108, 110, 111, 114 Unity, 9, 30, 56, 59, 61, 72, 73, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 99, 103 V Vallaud-Belkacem, Najat, 58 Valls, Manuel, 108, 110, 113, 114, 116 Values, 46, 49, 52, 56–59, 71, 72, 78, 95, 96, 99 Victims, 3, 4, 8, 9, 16, 17, 24, 26, 27, 29–31, 37, 39, 41, 43, 47, 56–58, 62–64, 72, 76, 82, 86, 111, 114 Victims’ associations, 37, 39, 43 Violence, 3, 4, 8, 38, 46, 71, 74, 78, 83, 86, 99, 112 W Web, 46, 49, 50 World Trade Center, 16, 17, 19 X Xenophobia, 94, 96, 97