France: A Strange Defeat

Mark Lilla, "France: A Strange Defeat", dans The New York Review of Books, mars 2015 (compte rendu du livre Le Suicide français d'Éric Zemmour).

Extrait de l'article

For three days the sirens never stopped in Paris. They began on the morning of January 7 right after two French Muslim terrorists infiltrated the offices of Charlie Hebdo in the Marais and killed twelve people. A police dragnet spread out as the killers veered through the city before they escaped in the direction of Reims. The next morning a young policewoman was shot dead on a street near a Jewish school just outside the freeway ringing the city and again the police spread out. On January 9 television stations reported that another terrorist had taken hostages at a kosher grocery store near the Porte de Vincennes, and through the window of my office, which gives onto the Seine, I heard a steady stream of police and military vehicles rushing to the scene throughout the day. And then ambulances, which meant the news was not good.

Yet somehow it did not feel as if lightning had struck. Of course no one had predicted the spectacular assaults that took place. But throughout 2014 a series of disturbing events had in a sense primed the French public for them. Within days of the killings one began to witness a retrospective narrative developing, which suggested that “all the signs were there” but “they”—the government, the police, journalists—refused to recognize them. Untrue, but it is not a hard story to sell.

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