Charlie Hebdo killings: Terrorists grab headlines, but liberty to question will see French values through

Harish Nambiar
In August 2003, the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at the Pentagon screened Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers to US troops about to embark for Iraq. A flyer for the screening read:
“How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafés. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervour. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”

This Wednesday, liberal chic was ambushed by radical jihadi chic in the Paris office of a cartoon newspaper primarily known for lampooning. Unsurprisingly, the ones with guns won a tactical victory for extremist Islam. There are reasons to believe that the strategic victory is unlikely. It left France, a country long admired universally for its celebration of the life of the mind and virtues of freedom, devastated. Among the 12 killed were four of the most talented and seasoned cartoonists of contemporary France.

In an ironic way, it also underlined the renewal of The Battle of Algiers with the sides changed and stakes upped. The urban warfare has moved to the capitals of the western world; the fight is about ideas and ideals it long held dear. The French journalists were at the frontier of that battle. Charlie Hebdo was unflinchingly direct, often crude and proud of being so. It fought for the right to offend all sacred cows of religion and extremism with garish delight in line with its “secular and atheistic” beliefs. It was an equal-opportunity lampooner of all forms of extremism.

The debate about extremist Islam has been skewed by a false conflation of criticism against a belief system being slander of a people. Similarly, it is logically flawed to insist that any criticism of a belief system from the outside has to conform to the belief system’s own taboos and rules.

On the other hand, Charlie Hebdo’s tool for its criticism was satire. Satire, much like some jokes, tends to work only among a set of people who share certain assumptions and have a consensus about them. In other words, context is king. The Battle of Algiers brought out this conflict of assumptions in this particularly pointed exchange between the arrested leader of the Algerian militia, Ben M’hidi, who is presented before journalists.

A journalist: Ben M’hidi, don’t you think it’s a bit cowardly to use women’s baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?

Ben M’hidi: And doesn’t it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenceless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes, it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets. The exchange also underlines the unequal forces at the battle in Algiers. But the ideal of Algerian independence was stronger than the colonial French forces. This time, the idea that the cartoonists represent, the best values of European Enlightenment, is the stronger idea.

Honouring the Dissident

The latest issue of Charlie Hebdo had another man who has benefitted greatly from the French tradition of honouring the dissident, the outsider. Michel Houellebecq, celebrated and hated in equal measure for his unfashionable takes on several dearly held concepts of the European intelligentsia, is about to launch a new novel Submission, or Soumission in French, that imagines an Islamic party ruling in France after the 2022 elections.

The book paints a scary picture in the aftermath of that victory when women forsake western dress, male unemployment drops dramatically and universities become Islamic.

When The Paris Review asked if he didn’t think it will help reinforce the image of France in which Islam hangs overhead, like the most frightening thing of all, this was his response:

“In any case, that’s pretty much all the media talks about, they couldn’t talk about it more. It would be impossible to talk about it more than they already do, so my book won’t have any effect.”

There does not seem any immediate danger to French values for now, and definitely not from the 10% of the country that belong to Islamic faith. Terrorists will probably score spectacularly horrendous headlines with acts like the one in Paris. After all, terrorism thrives on gore and the outrage it incites, but an intellectual tradition of seeking to question and understand, offensively or otherwise, with robust intelligence and forensic detail, will see the French values through.

While the Paris attack would, in the short term, feed anti-Islamic sentiment as seen in Germany lately, the Voltairian strain of the French tradition can’t be seen as crumbling or shrinking in fear.

There are hitches, but eventually things smoothen, and the character of the people shines through. After all, The Battle of Algiers too was released in France five years later, for its controversial subject and a not-too-flattering picture of French colonial army. That Wednesday’s attack did not delay the next week’s issue of the lampoon newspaper is a great omen.



(The writer, a former journalist, now travels and writes)