After the astonishing German break through the French lines in May 1940, Winston Churchill flew to Paris to meet his French counterpart, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, and army chief Maurice Gamelin. Reynaud had called Churchill in near-hysterics, but even Churchill wasn’t prepared for the utter despondency he would find amongst the French command. “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?” Churchill asked in his charmingly awful French. “Aucune!” replied Gamelin. There were no strategic reserves. The realization that France would fall, Churchill later recalled, was one of the most shocking moments of a life full of them.
I couldn’t help but think of Reynaud and Gamelin while listening to first reactions of the French political class to the assault on Paris. On the line while the situation was still out-of-control, the deputy mayor of Paris Patrick Klugman spoke to CNN in a weeping, disoriented tone—more a grieving family member than an official charged with the safety of a capital city. President François Hollande offered some strong first remarks, promising a “war which will be pitiless” against terrorists. He had spoken well after the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in January, but, then as now, his body language told a different story. Very few watching the weary-looking Hollande could persuade themselves that he would rise to master events rather than merely react to them. Of course it is not 1940, and France might be able to call upon politicians steelier than its prewar chiefs. But it’s an open question whether the country is up to the task it faces.
In the week following the attack, the French government has certainly stepped up the fight against Islamism both abroad and at home. Already active in Syria, French warplanes have been conducting their most extensive bombing missions against ISIS, the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, is on its way to the Gulf, and Hollande has proposed extending the domestic state of emergency for three months, giving French security services extra latitude to pursue leads and question suspects. The interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has called for a dissolution of radical mosques and the expulsion of those who “preach hatred in France.”
These moves expand upon steps taken after the January attacks, when the government acknowledged—rather forthrightly—that its security apparatus was understaffed, underfunded, and overwhelmed. As also seems to be the case with the current attacks, the terrorists at Charlie Hebdo, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, had been on the radar of French security services. Surveillance had been lifted, however, because there were simply too many other persons of interest requiring it. Prime Minister Manuel Valls, one of the more energetic and competent French politicians, boosted the budget for intelligence-gathering operations and hired thousands of new counterterrorism officials. A few plots and attempted attacks—most spectacularly on the high-speed train in August—have been disrupted or foiled. Whatever else one might say about the French response, the government has not coasted along in denial.
The problem is that the character of the terrorism threat in France differs from that facing other Western nations. France does not keep official statistics on its citizens’ religion, but its Muslim population is estimated to be around 10 percent, excluding the current influx of refugees. Largely North African and Middle Eastern in origin, the community is much more homogenous than the comparably large but diverse Muslim population of Great Britain. To be sure, most French Muslims simply want to get on with their lives—though a recent survey found that around a quarter of all French youth express some sympathy for ISIS. This number is probably inflated, but in practice it means that terrorists have significant networking advantages within France (and, as we see, within Belgium).
In America, a terror cell has very few places to hide. In France, there are more than a handful of areas, clustered especially around Paris, Marseille, and a few other big cities, where state law-and-order runs extremely thin. Every French banlieue is depressing in its own way, and certainly not all of them are dangerous and gang-ridden. But the ones that are provide a fairly hospitable environment for terrorists to go about their business unnoticed. French security can, of course, follow Internet “chatter” and phone calls, but one of the frightening lessons of recent days is that attackers have learned to keep much of their organizing offline, except for the postmortem gloating.
Leaving aside the question of the fight against ISIS in Syria, which, to be frank, France can’t handle on its own, what can it do about its domestic threat? The strategist David Goldman has suggested France undertake a kind of “surge” whereby the state makes a concerted effort to reassert its authority over the dangerous banlieues. Through a war on gangs, petty criminals, and, one could add, radical mosques, those who now either actively support or turn a blind eye to terrorism might conclude they have more to fear from the state than from the criminals or terrorists, thus boosting the flow of information in the dangerous neighborhoods towards the government. A highly visible effort to prove that the French state has reach everywhere, along with bolstered intelligence, could ultimately weaken the networks that terrorists rely upon to engage in mass-casualty attacks.
The chance the French would tolerate this or some other highly intrusive strategy is, one has to think, fairly small. Thinking beyond the solidarity of this week, one can already imagine the army of French intellectuals on their preferred battlefield, the opinion pages of the major newspapers, denouncing a “new Algeria,” a “colonialism at home” that, far from fighting terror, would breed more resentment, more violence, and riots even bigger than the ones that have convulsed France in recent years. Supporters of a tough policy might respond that, actually, the longer France waits to enforce order throughout the country, the more likely it will suffer riots and street battles of a vehemence of which French history furnishes all too many examples. Even in ordinary times, French law and custom offer the government broad powers to engage in this kind of policing. But it’s unclear whether any French politician would take full advantage.
The essential question, in other words, is not whether France has the capability to deal with its very substantial terrorism problem, but whether it has the moral resources to do so. As has been frequently remarked, France seems to be the European country that has put up the staunchest fight against multi-culturalism. While in recent years they have grudgingly acknowledged the need to learn English, politicians of all stripes still insist on the importance of the French language—spoken correctly—and bemoan the precipitous decline of it among the younger generation. Public outcries have met demands by some Muslim parents that school cafeterias not only provide some alternative to pork, but ban it completely. Considered an affront to aesthetic sensibilities and the proper relation between men and women, the 2011 prohibition on the hijab has been broadly, though not universally, accepted. Both before the attack and in the wake of it, the French “way of life” has had its patriotic defenders.
The more one pays attention to these defenses (as I did when living in France during its last presidential election in 2012), though, the more one begins to see that they are somewhat hollow. In the wake of last week’s attack, patriotic French men and women have insisted in a praiseworthy way on going out to the bars and cafés to spend time en terrasse. Almost entirely missing from this defense of their way of life is any invocation of the reason behind that way of life, an explanation as to why, for instance, a certain equality between the sexes is natural and what the foundation is for the toleration of religious difference. Neither this week nor previously did one hear much of a French invocation of first principles.
Proponents of the French way of life have simply been matching custom against custom, as if it’s self-evident why one should prefer to have a glass of wine with a beautiful woman in a café rather than smoke nargillah with a group of men while the women stay at home. The deterioration in the banlieues reveals that many Frenchmen don’t believe this. In fact, opinion surveys of the angst, fears over lack of life prospects, and sense of purposelessness afflicting younger French people of all backgrounds proves that this is not merely a problem for newcomers.
Have the French successfully resisted multiculturalism? A far more powerful political dynamic than the defense of the French way of life and its customs has been, for the past few generations, the move to construct a supranational Europe dedicated in theory to a world without borders. Along with this has grown an individualism that denies all national and collective purpose. Considering the “I am Charlie” slogan after the January attacks, the political writer Pierre Manent noted that it’s much harder to say “we” than to say “I”—and no one was saying we. France’s inability to say we—and explain the purpose behind that we—will be its biggest obstacle as it confronts a threat that can rightly be called existential.
Neil Rogachevsky is the Tikvah postdoctoral fellow at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center.
