TO FOLLOW UP on last week’s article on the state of French public opinion:
The country has been exercised for much of the past month by incidents at a match between the French and Algerian national soccer teams at the Stade de France outside Paris on October 6. It had been long planned as a “friendship match,” the first such meeting since Algeria became independent of France almost four decades ago. The French national team, which won the World Cup in 1998, has a lot of stars of North African descent–most notably the flamboyant midfielder Zinedine Zidane, who was born in the housing projects of Marseille–and the game’s organizers, particularly after the warm welcome the Algerian team received on its arrival, had high hopes.
They were disappointed. It’s not just that the match had to be called off when a gang of Algerians and French-Algerians stormed the field early in the game. (“We’d’ve lost the match anyway,” said one fatalistic Algerian.) It’s that when the Marseillaise, the French national anthem, was played before the match, 60,000 French citizens of Arab descent booed it. (Or whistled at it, as they do in France.) A smaller number then began to chant the name of Osama bin Laden.
The incident received little press coverage. But it has generated a lot of fear. Coming on top of the arrest in Minnesota of Zacarias Massaoui, a French citizen, for involvement in the September 11 hijacking plots, and then the arrest in Paris of Djamel Beghal, another French citizen, for an attempt to blow up the American Embassy in France, it has left the French wondering whether they don’t have an inchoate revolutionary movement forming on their own soil. The incident has generated popularity for the incumbent (and firmly pro-American) president Jacques Chirac, who heads into next spring’s campaign with some of the highest approval ratings (58 percent) of his seven-year term. And it has generated outrage from francais de souche (native French) on websites and in letters-to-the-editor columns.
This being France, it has also generated paradox. In the days after the booing incident, Algerian intellectuals generally expressed shame at the Algerian “street.” Writing in the left-wing daily Liberation, the journalist Akram Ellyas condemned the crowd as “hoodlums.” But French intellectuals then expressed shame at the French “street.” Writing in the same paper the following day, journalist Pierre Marcelle reminded readers that “booing the Marseillaise isn’t a crime, or even a misdemeanor.”
Nope. It was worse than a crime, as Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe once said. It was a mistake.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
