French self-congratulation on response to attacks undercut by unease

The unity march that brought an estimated 3.7 million people on to the streets of France transformed one of the most traumatic and horrific sequences of events in the country's modern history into a kind of victory.

The French people have been jolted out of their anaesthetised state, wrote Libération's editor Laurent Joffrin. "They have just risen in a magnificent elan, like never in the last 50 years . . . This mobilisation will remain in memory like a landmark, a lighthouse, a democratic beacon!"

"In decline, France?" the France Inter radio editorialist Bernard Guetta asked. "May the theoreticians of our suicide and the prophets of our doom lower their heads in shame . . . Yes, we are going through a bad patch; but no, France is not dead. She is more alive, more sweet and strong than ever, and the French have every reason to be proud."

Yet an undercurrent of unease runs through the pride and self-congratulation.

Young men in the suburb of Gennevilliers, where the Kouachi brothers responsible for the murderous attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo lived, told a Telegraph reporter that they were local heroes. "We're not Charlie," one said, alluding to the nationwide slogan "Je suis Charlie". "We're Kouachi."

Said and Cherif Kouachi and Ahmedy Coulibaly, attacker of the kosher supermarket, murdered 17 people in three days last week.

Twitter

discussions The hashtags #JeSuisKouachi, #NousSommesKouachis and #JeSuis Coulibaly, as well as the Facebook entry “Respect for Said, Cherif and Coulibaly for having defended Islam, they’re not terrorists” have been the subject of 35,000 discussions on Twitter.

A lycée student in heavily immigrant Seine-Saint-Denis asked his teacher: "Why does the state ban [anti-Semitic comedian] Dieudonné and not Charlie Hebdo?"

French authorities launched an investigation for “apology for terrorism” after Dieudonné published a Facebook entry on Sunday night in which he said he felt like “Charlie Coulibaly”.

When a youth's teacher asked her class to observe a minute's silence in homage to the victims at Charlie Hebdo, he reportedly told her he wished he had a Kalashnikov to kill her. At the same time, Muslim prison detainees shouted "Allahu akbar!" through barred windows.

Some Muslims refused to attend the unity march because of the presence of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Le Monde of France reported misgivings at the highest level about Netanyahu's visit. Four of the 17 murder victims were Jews murdered by Coulibaly in the Kosher supermarket.

"There will be a before and an after what has happened," prime minister Manuel Valls predicted. The terrible events of last week boosted President François Hollande politically in the short term but risk strengthening National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the long run.

No one expects the "union sacrée" between socialists and the conservative UMP to last.

Hollande changed the perception that he is indecisive and uncaring. From the morning of the attack at Charlie Hebdo, when he rushed to the scene of the massacre, he was decisive. Faced with twin hostage crises on Friday afternoon he gave the order for simultaneous assaults.

The president has shown compassion, repeatedly visiting the wounded in hospital and comforting the families of the dead. For the first time he seems to embody the French ideal of a "father of the nation". Twenty-one and a half million people tuned in to his televised address on the night of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, more than twice the number who had listened to his new year wishes a week earlier.

Even the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro praised Hollande.

"His hand didn't tremble . . . his words were appropriate, his crisis management precise and in conformity with the demands of his office," Guillaume Tabard wrote.

“Who could have imagined that the most criticised and unpopular president of the Fifth Republic would meet his rendezvous with history?”

After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and the attacks in Spain in 2004 and in Britain in 2005, France has been wounded by its most shocking Islamist attack. There will be a before and an after in terms of the French people’s sense of security.

Le Pen is demanding the restoration of the death penalty. The former president and UMP leader Nicolas Sarkozy wants the deportation of returnees "who go to the jihad to learn to use weapons to destroy our civilisation".

The prime minister said on yesterday that Islamist prisoners will be put in solitary confinement, to prevent them converting others.

France has passed 15 anti-terrorist laws since 1986, including two under Hollande’s presidency. There seems to be a consensus that France must not pass excessive security legislation, as the US did after 9/11. The Patriot Act led to indefinite detention and torture for prisoners at Guantánamo, and to spying on a huge scale by the National Security Agency.