Bataclan brought us together – but this will drive a wedge into France
here. The more they separate seemingly ordinary Muslims from the national community, the better, they believe – especially if activists and the commentariat’s useful idiots reinforce notion that the perpetrators were “driven to it”.
We French are endlessly lectured on how we “parked” Muslim immigrants into banlieue “ghettoes” and treated them appallingly.
Yet in the Fifties and Sixties, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants moved into social housing and integrated into French society without girls wearing headscarves and burqas in a country that had never seen such things before.
Nowhere have the imams been more active than in French jails. If many do integrate, Muslim men still disproportionately people French prisons, representing more than 60 per cent of all inmates. Muslim women, incidentally, have an entirely different narrative: they strive at school, in part to escape the overbearing domination of their fathers and brothers. Remarkably, almost all Muslim cabinet ministers appointed by Left- or Right-wing governments have been women.
But the failure to integrate restless young Muslim men has led to violence and, in turn, revived the Le Pens’ Front National. Now, France finds itself caught in a fatal loop of fear and recrimination, where each side’s grievances fed from the existence of the other.
No French region is more sensitive to the failings of integration as Provence-Côte d’Azur, where only last year Marine Le Pen’s hard-line niece, Marion, was nearly voted president on a strong anti-foreigner platform. Nice, together with the regional capital, Marseille, and countless smaller towns with large Muslim populations in south-east France, is the Front’s prime battlefield. So the attack on Bastille Day revellers in Nice was, in fact, a major coup for Isil because it will exacerbate the racial tensions upon which it thrives.
In this fraught context, it is unlikely that we’ll see a fraternal march in Nice, with people carrying “Je Suis Fatima” placards, as they had “Je Suis Ahmed” ones in memory of the Muslim policeman killed in front of the Charlie-Hebdo offices. The absence of inter-religious solidarity will be felt by the blameless Muslim victims’ families as an undeserved insult.
Meanwhile, France’s politicians, unlike after previous terrorist attacks, have left their shell-shocked constituents bereft. With next year’s presidential and general elections in their sights, they have given up on national unity to denounce mismanagement of security measures. This comes across badly in a country where the political class is increasingly despised by the public.
Charlie-Hebdo and the Bataclan had brought us all, as a nation, together. Nice, I am sad to say, may prove the most divisive blow against the France of liberté, égalité and fraternité.