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“I Am Charlie”: How Four Million People Stood Up against Terrorism

2023; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-031-46254-2_6

2197-5787

Serge Guimond, Armelle Nugier,

Religion and Society Interactions

Something very unusual occurred on January 11, 2015, with the largest human gathering ever recorded on the streets of France and all over France (Boussaguet and Faucher 2017; Weil and Truong 2015). In Paris alone, there was probably more than 1.5 million people according to Le Monde (13 January 2015, see Buffier and Galinier 2015), more than at the liberation of Paris on August 26, 1944, and more than when France won its first world cup on July 12, 1998. François Hollande, President of France, who made national and international calls to make of this day an important show of force was heading the march in the middle of the street in Paris, with Angela Merkel (German chancellor) beside him, Donald Tusk from Poland (President of the European Council), Mahmoud Abbas (Palestine), and Matteo Renzi (Italy). On the right side of Hollande, there was Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (Mali), beside Benyamin Netanyahou (Israel) and further down David Cameron (the UK), and Mariano Rajoy (Spain) with more than 40 other heads of States in the back of this first line. In Clermont-Ferrand where we live, the Place de Jaude was full packed with more than 70,000 people marching. Across France, people were peacefully marching, many holding gigantic pencils or various signs: “Je suis Charlie/I am Charlie,” “Not afraid,” “Liberté, égalité, fraternité, laïcité.” The badge highlighted at the beginning of this chapter is, we believe, a particularly important definition of the meaning of the saying “I am Charlie.” If you are Jewish, you cannot be a Muslim, so this badge can be viewed as nonsense. If you are Muslim, can you be French? The proper answer from the point of view of the French universalism model is that we do not care about the groups that you belong to. You can be Muslim, Jewish, and Christian, whatever you like. The only important thing is that you are a citizen. From that perspective, you can be Charlie, French, Muslim, and Jewish at the same time; it doesn’t matter. This is what being French should mean, in theory. The point is that this badge would have little meaning if the march was in New York, London, or Montreal. But in France, it made sense.