Last week four Parisian policemen were stabbed to death by a 45 year old computer operator in a police headquarters. This surprise attack by an employee of 15 years radicalized by Islamic extremism, staggered law enforcement and government agencies in France. Terry Field, an Englishman who summers in Normandy and winters in Florida, reflects on this tragedy and the French President's reaction. - Glenn N. Holliman
Desperation
by Terry Field
In the courtyard of the Prefecture of Police, the rain is
freezing and driving like needles into the unmoving faces. There is no sun. The
square used by the French State for all such obsequies to murdered police and
others is surrounded by high buildings whose blank windows are like dead eyes. In
the square, the ranks of police, fire fighters and other ‘first responders’ are
at attention. Nobody moves.
In the shelter of one of the colonnades, two past Presidents
of the Republic stand in fragile sadness.
The families of the victims to be honoured are clustered
around protecting groups of those unable to speak.
A drum sounds - hard, spare, separate from life.
As it beats its dreadful observation, the four coffins of
the dead are brought to their prepared places, tenderly laid upon biers, and
their medals given in life are laid on them upon cushions. An empty cushion
sits at the front of each, soon to support the state’s final and most
distinguished honour.
The Minster of the Interior approaches the line of coffins
and offers to each the posthumous Legion D’Honneur. He lays each gently on the
waiting cushion. His face is sphinx–like. He is coping; but only with obvious
difficulty.
He repeats the same action before each of the coffins.
He retreats to his place. During this part of the obsequy
there is an accompanying trumpet. There
is majesty in the tone. Not appropriate here, but the Legion D’Honneur is
ordinarily offered with rejoicing and happiness at a celebration of a life well
lived and deserving in that life of the accolade.
Today they is bestowed upon the memory of people whose boxed
corpses are all that is present to receive them.
The parade remains silent and does not move for some
minutes. The rain cuts the air but nothing else moves at all. Then President
Macron appears. He is holding up well. He has his task to perform, and he must
represent the state. At this point I wonder at his nature.
I am moved beyond
words. I am dumbstruck. I am old. He seems to be so young, clear-eyed, strong
and possessed of that clear face that makes one think immediately of France.
The jaw is set. The eyes roam but he has his task. I am put in mind of the
painting of Napoleon retreating from Moscow, on his white stallion. He must get
through this. Now there is only survival. The eyes burn with determination. All
else is dispensed with. Now M. Macron,
the man, must speak.
He must talk to the
nation; he must talk to those present. He must place a marker in the ground
concerning how the French cope with what has happened, what must happen, and
who has responsibility for the direction of the future.
His address is not what I anticipated, but because of this
it far more disturbing.
Firstly the immediate context. The faces he sees as his eyes
survey the square before him. All there express a similar condition. One that
is rarely seen in such people. There is the desperate sadness of a camaraderie
whose members are slain. Some knew the dead, most did not, but there was
another image written on the faces. The anger and knowledge of the loneliness
of their dangers were everywhere to be seen.
As President Macron spoke, all stared ahead with resolution.
One appeared to faint and was gently carried off. No others moved.
The shock from the President’s address was electric. He firstly,
as one would expect, held the families of the dead close to him. For (to me) a
still-young man, he looked both powerful but in real pain. He made me connect
to the pain all the watching French felt at that moment. After this he referred
with urgency to the universally offered supposition that the killer believed in
a variation of Islam that was a ‘death-cult’. But then he said something truly
shocking, that transmitted the awareness of desperation from the head of state
to the people.
After saying the State would look to deal with the danger
expressed in these killings, he suggested that the threat of this form of
terror could not be solved by the State. That had not been said before by any
statesman I have listened to in Europe. He suggested forcefully that the entire
population must engage in extreme vigilance in identifying the ‘radicalised’
Muslim.
He appealed for the people to cling to ‘Laiceite’ or
secularism, the over-arching rational response of the intellect and logic to
problems, that is the wonderful inheritance of the ‘social intellect’, the
Republic preserved from the enlightenment and its physical manifestation, the
French State and people.
This was a bombshell. The result has been a collective
nervous breakdown of the commentariat, the intellectual backbone of the
country. Why? Because the secular state has proceeded upon the clear
understanding- for over two centuries- that the power of its ideas could
contain irrational dissent, marginalise personal religious belief such that it
would never again drive divisive social attitudes in any significant group of
the population. That such a strong continuing statement of Republican
values would always triumph to make for a connected and mutually supporting
population of all French men and women.
But President Macron said that this was no longer possible;
that the majority should spy on the minority, indeed on each other, searching
for dissent and worse.
He could only be suggesting, for no other meaning was
possible, that out of Islam – within the number of many more than ten million Muslims presently living in France – the vigilant population must expose the
potent danger to the country before the French again faced slaughter. The
‘conversion to Islam’ of the killer who murdered these police staff came out of
the population of believers. This reality was accepted by Macron, simply by it
not being denied by him.
The exchange of many pious emails between the killer and his
wife was the backdrop and framework to his slashing knives.
Of course M. Macron said there must be more ‘education’, more
‘prevention’, more ‘anti-radicalisation,’ as all heads of state do on such
dreadful occasions, but there was, in truth, no conviction, no real belief, no real
expectation that this would or even could be effective. Rather he accentuated
universal oversight and spying.
He in effect admitted that within the French nation, a very large
group – too large for the French Sate to be able to ‘oversee’ or even identify
- of potentially violent alien minds lurked, and from this root of alien
thinking many were likely to act unpredictably in future.
The media immediately asked how it was possible to ‘spy’ on ‘fellow
citizens’ without junking the now resultant clearly threadbare pretense of
‘social inclusion’, ‘anti-discrimination’, ‘anti-racism’ and all the other constructed
shibboleths the last thirty years of reality-modifying political preconceptions
has spawned across Europe.
The requirement, he suggested, was for an engaged total population
of ‘watchers’, looking for any and every sign of ‘radicalisation’. It was no
longer intellectually convincing that radical killers came from other than the
body of Muslims within the nation. The assertion that such people should be ‘watched’
by all others implicitly accepts that the ‘radicalised’ Muslim springs from,
and is intimately connected to, the core religion that many millions of French
people adhere to, whatever the individual’s point of origin may be.
The internal threat is clearly defined by the speech of the
president. NO longer is ‘radicalisation’ a disembodied thing. Now it has a
root. And the root must be uncovered by the nation of the ‘watchers’
In the time of the last incumbent, President Hollande, the then
Prime Minister M. Valls stated that he was offering the Muslim community the ‘last
chance’ to integrate and fully connect to the rest of France. He observed that
a number of prior attempts to ‘reach out’ by the state had been rejected, and
his offer was the last that would be made.
This latest slaughter, following on Bataclan and the dreadful
earlier atrocities in Paris, and under a subsequent president, questions where
on earth the society goes from here.
That angry confusion was written powerfully on the drenched
faces of the brave policemen and women in the forlorn square. As an observer,
that is what struck me most forcibly. The police looked vulnerable in a way I
had not seen before.
A new President has confirmed that the problem is now so
vast as to require an auto-police state of all citizens.
I am reminded of the
dress of Elizabeth 1st in England, where eyes and ears where painted
all over the fabric of her dress to assert that the State is always listening
to and guarding against Catholic danger.
Macron went far further. He draws ‘eyes and ears’ on the
clothing of all the citizenry.
Am I now my Brother’s Watcher??? It would seem so.
