Fraternité: Of the three great founding principles of the secular French state, it was the third, fraternité, that united France in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Fraternité: that healing warmth, born of human fellowship and empathy, without which the two other animating principles of the democratic republic – liberté and égalité – remain empty and impotent.
THE THIRTY THOUSAND PARISIANS who braved the mid-winter cold
in the Place de La République last Wednesday declared they were “not afraid”. I
didn’t believe them. Horror, fear, and anger clamped hard around my heart as I
absorbed the news of the deadly attack on the offices of the French satirical
newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and the equally deadly sieges that
followed. Had the French people not been gripped by very similar emotions,
they would not have been human.
Especially unnerving was the Parisian demonstrators’
silence. Clustering protectively around the towering statue of Marianne,
personification of the French Republic, they gave no audible expression to
their feelings. Instead there was an intense stillness. People lit candles.
Some carried hand-lettered signs. Many read, simply: “Je suis Charlie.”
I am Charlie.
Of the three great founding principles of the secular French
state, it was the third, fraternité,
that bound this vast crowd together: that healing warmth, born of human
fellowship and empathy, without which the two other animating principles of the
democratic republic – liberté and égalité – remain empty and impotent.
It was the violation of fraternité
that took France’s breath away. The coolly proficient murderers who gunned down
two gendarmes, a janitor, and the core of Charlie
Hebdo’s editorial team, spoke in accentless French. It was this chilling
fact that punctured the nation’s heart. That these young men, nursed at
Marianne’s breast, felt not the slightest tremor of brotherly feeling as they
gunned down twelve of their fellow citizens.
The killers’ pure and utterly merciless manifestation of
religious outrage was as shocking as it was, perversely, awe-inspiring. Their
absolute certainty about doing God’s work freed them from every social
obligation and legal restriction. In a world made luminous by the eternal and
unchallengeable injunctions of the divine, they’d turned themselves into holy
instruments: as impervious to remonstration and remorse as the cutting edge of
the Prophet’s sword, or the 7.62mm rounds of their AK47 assault rifles.
If there is a design fault in the human animal then, surely,
this is it. Humanity’s ability to conjure itself into the dissociative fugue
state of religious and/or ideological rapture. A state in which all awareness of
personal responsibility falls away and we are driven to the most extreme acts by
the conviction that, in hastening the arrival of the heavenly – or earthly –
paradise, we are doing good.
To bring the whole of humankind into the body of the
faithful. To advance social justice through the dictatorship of reason and
virtue, Aryan genetics, or the proletariat. To establish the sovereign
individual within a perfectly free and unfettered market economy.
In the name of perfecting humanity, everything is permissible.
The West is delusional if it believes itself immune to this
deadly condition. We may congratulate ourselves that the Crusades and the Spanish
Inquisition lie safely in our past and that, as heirs of the European
Enlightenment, we have moved beyond the reach of religious extremism. But this
is to overlook Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s
death camps. Or, if these seem too far away, the IMF’s structural adjustment
programmes and George Bush’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”.
Charlie Hebdo
itself falls squarely into the long European tradition of exposing the rank
hypocrisy of those who set themselves up as the inerrant judges of human
frailty. From Chaucer to Boccaccio, Voltaire to Swift, the failure of
individuals and institutions in authority to live up to their own moral
precepts has inspired artistic works of satirical genius.
The French, in particular, have an historical aversion to
“clericalism” – i.e. the unwarranted interference of religious institutions in
education and politics. Indeed, “anti-clerical” French republicans have been
doing battle with the French religious authorities since at least the
Eighteenth Century. The French Left is, accordingly, forever on its guard
against any threat – be it Christian, Judaic or Muslim – to the cherished
principles of the French Revolution’s secular republic.
France is also the home of the expression “épater la
bourgeoisie” (shock the middle classes). Alarming and/or outraging the fatuous
and far-too-comfortable beneficiaries of the political status quo has been a
favourite sport of iconoclastic and revolutionary French artists and writers
since the mid-Nineteenth Century. In this, too, Charlie Hebdo is as French as frogs-legs.
A curiously symmetrical symbolic relationship thus embraces
both the holy warriors who gunned down the staff of Charlie Hebdo, and the latter’s militant secularist mission. On
either side of this tragedy stand fervent believers in, and unflinching
defenders of, compelling religious and political traditions.
Perhaps the great mass of Parisians in the Place de la
République remained silent in conscious acknowledgement of the deadly
consequences that follow when we make ourselves captive to the battle-cries of
uncompromising conviction. A charge upon which both the slayers and the slain,
fused now forever in death, must – tragically – stand convicted.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
13 January 2015.
