Paris attacks: in 1986 France united. Can it find common cause again? / GUARDIAN.

1986: 600,000 people throng Paris after the killing of Franco-Algerian student Malik Oussekine, 20, in police custody. Photograph: Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Paris attacks: in 1986 France united. Can it find common cause again?

30 years ago the liberal left protested alongside French Arabs over a young man’s death in custody. Can that alliance hold?

Ed Vulliamy in Paris

The Observer, Saturday 10 January 2015 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/10/paris-attacks-france-liberal-left-protest-arabs

Almost every face and facet of Paris was there: an apparently endless procession of 600,000 people winding along the boulevards through the grey afternoon of 10 December 1986. Their cause: outrage at the killing of a Franco-Algerian student called Malik Oussekine in police custody, after his arrest during demonstrations against a proposed education law.

It had been my brother’s birthday the day before and what he wanted for a present was to jettison the planned family dinner, board a boat-train and be there: to join Arab France, liberal France and leftwing France, all together with arms linked. The militants of mai ’68 and the sons and daughters of the Algerian war of independence – the Latin Quarter and the poor, immigrant suburbs – united in common cause.

Three decades later, these two communities are at best ill at ease in each other’s company, at worst riven by mutual hostility.

The scenes at the Place de la République on Wednesday night invoked the best of America on the evening of 11 September 2001 in New York. Then: candles in Washington Square, peace signs and a promise by crowds of young people to answer violence with a loud “no” to war. In Paris, they sat, stood or kneeled in silence around shrines of candles; every now and then a pen or pencil would float across the air, on to the great pile, which seemed to say, as did so many cartoons in tribute: we answer your bullets with a Staedtler HB. A lone alto-sax player played a dirge; the young crowd sang Imagine by John Lennon and even the Italian resistance song, Bella Ciao.

But everyone knows this is not the whole story. In the Goutte d’Or region of northern Paris on Friday, one of the last within the périphérique which is almost entirely Arab and African, a man called Suley talked – as do many – about what they call le ricochet of Wednesday’s bullets. By which Suley meant: “If they want to talk about 11 September, look at what happened next. War in Iraq, war against Muslims.”

Official Islam, as it is called in the press here, has voiced its condemnation of last week’s events loud and clear. There have been marches by Muslims behind banners reading “Non à la fanatisme” and parades by Muslims singing the Marseillaise. Candles burn in the 19th arrondissement – where the Kouachi brothers prepared to fight jihad – just as they do all over Paris. But this is not the welded, blood-brotherhood between the liberal left and Arab Paris that characterised that day in 1986. The question now facing France after last week’s terrible events is whether this alliance has turned into a bloody rift.

Charlie Hebdo has deep roots in a tradition of graphic satire dating back to the 18th century, released during a brief freedom of the press granted after the revolution of 1830 and brought to bloom by Honoré Daumier – with his savage depictions of the law at work – and Gustave Doré. It was not always a force of the left: a royalist cartoonist was guillotined by the revolutionaries in 1793 and antisemitic stereotypes were a characteristic of Vichy French cartoons during the Nazi occupation.

But cartoonists are what they are, instinctively if not always politically anarchist, and Charlie’s recent origins rest firmly in the uprising of May ’68, the zenith of “usines, universités, union” – factories, universities, united – as the slogan asserted on silkscreen prints by the Atelier Populaire, some of the greatest political art of the 20th century.

It was and is self-evident that the movement that produced Charlie Hebdo incorporated those who challenge imperialism, combat racism and had supported Algerian independence. Crucially, it entwined the severity of the cause with its iconoclastic playfulness – the slogans of the day were: “Be reasonable, demand the impossible!” or “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Under the cobblestones, the beach”): 1968 was a cartoonist’s dream.

Those among the dead last week who epitomised the heritage were Cabu and Wolinski. The latter – grand old man of French bandes dessinées (cartoons) or just BD, as cartoons are known – founded the paper Enragé, a major moment in political art which blossomed out of the événements of ’68, then Hara-Kiri Hebdo, Charlie’s precursor, banned for its irreverent coverage of General Charles de Gaulle’s death. Though no communist, Wolinski worked for many years for the Communist party’s daily paper, L’Humanité.

Cabu’s trajectory was almost exactly parallel: at Enragé and Hara-Kiri Hebdo, later the leftwing Paris-Soir, his political conscience awakened by national service in Algeria, which appalled him.

The paper’s editor Charb, of a younger generation, became a supporter of the Communist party, regular artist for L’Humanité and prominent sponsor of the current Front de Gauche – Left Front – which combines ex-communists, far-leftwingers and greens to contest elections. The names alongside him on FDG’s list of celebrity sponsors include fellow cartoonists Al Coutelis, Babouse and Chimulus – plus writers, journalists and poets of post-May ’68 stock.

The life of the great Dutch cartoonist Willem was saved by his self-confessed boredom with Charlie’s editorial meetings: he was on a train to Paris from his home on an island off Brittany on Wednesday morning, to deliver his drawings. Willem had arrived in France from Amsterdam during 1968 and never left. He called, and calls himself, proudly, an anarchist.

I shared a platform with Willem at a book fair in Metz recently; as so often with cartoonists, he was the life and soul of the communal meals, with his moustache and mop of grey hair, and during sessions he established a system of using the toilet in a local bar rather than that supplied by the organisers “so I can refill with a beer while I piss”. He joked about threats from Islamists: “It’s nice to know someone takes my work seriously.”

8 January 2015: Parisians gather at the Place de la République after the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Three decades on, the makeup of the protesters is very different. Photograph: Romuald Meigneux/Sipa/Rex

This is the social and political cradle that defined and defines Charlie Hebdo. Why, then, did this sworn enemy of the establishment – which it held in playful ridicule – begin to target so ferociously, and fall bloody victim to, others who oppose that same establishment; opponents coming from the nest of fundamentalist Islam, some of whose embryonic militants were also on the streets that day in December 1986?

The cartoonist’s business is not so much politics as mischief. They are iconoclasts, not polemicists; anarchists at one level or another, not adherents. For the cartoonist, the ridicule you deserve accords with the ferocity with which you blather, preach or pose. And for cartoonists, rabid religion is the ultimate blathering dogma, which is why the Catholic church and orthodox Jewry share a place with Islamic fundamentalism on Charlie Hebdo’s dartboard.

No different from any other form of orthodoxy, Islam is deserving of a hollow laugh. One of Charlie’s most famous cartoons shows a man with a cross and a Jewish candelabra up his arse and a burka for a condom, entitled “The right to blaspheme”.

There is a deeper reason for this than just deserved mockery: in the pantheon of French republicanism, there is another word to add to the trinity of liberty, fraternity and equality: laïcité. “Secularity” doesn’t do the job of translation – laïcité describes France’s profound conviction and commitment that religion has no right or role to influence in society.

The quintessential fabric of laïcité begins with Diderot, Voltaire and early challenges to the power of the First Estate by the young lawyer Maximilien de Robespierre. Anti-clericalism propelled the French Revolution as much as any economic motive. In 1905, a critical law prohibited the role of religion in public life, nullifying Napoleon’s concordat with the papacy.

The expert on laïcité, Jean Baubérot, speaks about “an implicit competition between leftwing and rightwing parties to be perceived as the best champion of the 1905 law”. So much so that when it came to women’s suffrage in the 1940s, some radical politicians opposed it, fearing the influence of priests over women.

And the contemporary spirit of laïcité drives the left circles whence Charlie Hebdo came. Inasmuch as the FDG is the closest Charlie has to a political home, it is enlightening to look at its pillars of policy, prominent among them: “Re-affirmation of the law of 1905 on laïcité.” No other leftwing movement in Europe puts quite such emphasis on a determined stance against the influence of religion.

Into this republic, the Kouachi brothers were born. The 19th arrondissement of northeastern Paris is a poor but refreshing place: the brothers’ terrain runs between the Buttes-Chaumont park, after which they named their battalion, and in which they played football.

It is one of the few central areas in which young professionals can still consider a first home, and also where the lads gathered in the Chaum’ cafe on rue de Crimée. “They used to come in here before they went crazy,” says Ibrahim, under a bright fluorescent light.

However, people assure you, their real playground in the days of football and flirting – taking and petty dealing weed – was over west, in the Goutte d’Or. Here lies deep history of the fault lines in France; where the metro grinds atop stilts of concrete along an overpass of grey iron, above Boulevard de la Chapelle.

This is the quartier to which the dirt-poor from Provence arrived in the 19th century, in which Emile Zola set his novel, L’Assommoir, about a washerwoman who achieves her dream of setting up a small laundry, only to lose it to a descent into alcohol and despair.

In the year that Chérif Kouachi was born, 1982, I spent a honeymoon here in order to feel the steps of Zola’s characters on the cobblestones. By then, the poor Provençaux had moved on, and the Goutte d’Or was a place in which the edginess of colonial Algeria came home to Paris and never really went away. But you could still find the yard in which Gervaise had her laundry.

Then, during the boys’ young lives, the Goutte d’Or changed. As it became known as a warren of crime and defiance of authority, so the Kouachi brothers would have seen Gervaise’s courtyard make way for a new development including a militarily fortified police station opposite the cafe and sandwich bar at which they used to hang out. It’s still easy to imagine them, a couple of lads among the many gathered in huddles around the mobile phone shops and call booths, doing deals, watching the police, and being watched back.

As they grew up in this landscape of police surveillance over the bustle, the world was changing around them. In December 1986, the language of conflict was that of class and race; but by the time the Kouachi brothers reached adulthood, that discourse was replaced by Islam versus the west.

The impact on Europe’s Muslims of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was enormous. Everyone here knows that the war, and pictures from Abu Ghraib in its wake, changed the lives of thousands of young French Muslims. Hateful bigotry was busy in the immigrant quarters of and around Paris, as preachers emerged to spread the word of holy war, turning the boys who smoked and dealt a little weed, or bet on football, into soldiers of Allah.

The years following the Iraq invasion were eventful in the suburban cités around Paris. The winter of 2005 saw riots and a state of emergency declared by president Jacques Chirac. Even as they subsided, hatred of the police only deepened when his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, described and dismissed the rioters from the concrete-block ghettos as racaille – scum.

There was no apparent Islamist influence on the rioting, but something had changed: the French left was nowhere to be seen; the students were in the library; the Latin quarter was now a gentrified tourist theme park. The Arabs of 10 December 1986 were now on their own.

American writer David Rieff found that in the cités, a vacuum had been left by the collapse of the Communist party, a cement of sorts, providing youth with venues, structures – and sanction when it strayed. In that vacuum, disaffection and dissent took on not the language of class and race that mobilised the 600,000 in 1986, but the ideology spawned by war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2010, another raw nerve caught a spark and set fire. In the spirit of laïcité faced with religious insurgency, back in 2004, the Chirac government, with Socialist support, had passed a law banning “ostentatious” religious dress to school, which in practice meant a headscarf. The Sarkozy government added to this with a ban on burkas in public.

The measure was welcomed by many Muslim women, not least because the burka is rare in north Africa and seen as a fundamentalist intrusion from the Gulf.

But the laws were sufficient to provoke both further riots and the protest of further cartoons, invariably hilarious. Jean Baubérot says the issue was seen in leftwing and media circles as “more of a political than a religious sign, a symbol of women’s submission and a breach of laïcité”.

Charlie Hebdo kept going, often speaking what many people felt but dared not say about the fundamentalists, in moments of derisive mirth. Cartoons of Muhammad in 2006 led to an incendiary attack in 2011 and a temporary move to the offices of Libération, from which the next edition, on Wednesday, will be edited.

“Massacre of the insolents” read the best of last week’s many headlines, in La Voix du Nord. But: “We must insist on the right to laugh,” said Philippe Val, founder of Charlie Hebdo, on Friday, “and to ridicule those who are ridiculous.” Jean Plantin, cartoonist for Le Monde, insisted: “We have to do this work of impertinence.”

Although they do now talk about “responsibility”, through their bereavement and bewilderment , not a single cartoonist in the circle to which I spoke last week apologises for a single line on paper.

All of them would include fundamentalist Christianity alongside fundamentalist Islam in that category of ridicule, along with many of those who now, and on today’s marches of solidarity throughout France, will proclaim: “We are Charlie.”

“We have all these powerful new friends!” joked Willem on Friday night, as he headed back to Brittany. “The Queen of England! The pope! All Charlie! I don’t think so.”