ARTHUR RIMBAUD’S great 1871 poem, “Morning of Drunkenness,” concludes with a famous prediction: “Now is the time of the assassins.” The poet’s ecstatic vision may have been off by 150 years, but, between them, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, the perpetrators of the mass murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo’s offices and at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes in January of this year, appear to have helped usher in a real time of the assassins, one whose end is nowhere in sight. For the trio had their own ecstatic, murderous visions, ones for which neither the institutions of the French state nor the various strata of French civil society (to the extent they are separable in a France that remains corporatist in a way most of its EU partners do not) seem to have any antidote.

No doubt the immediate response to the killings was impassioned and determined. The passion expressed itself in the masses of people who began using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie both as an act of solidarity and as a symbolic restatement of France’s commitment to secularism and freedom of expression, as well as in the gigantic demonstration in memory of the victims, a photograph of which the newspaper Libération ran on its front page along with the headline “We Are One People.” The determination came in the form of the commitments made by President François Hollande’s government to crack down much harder on the jihadists in the country’s midst, including in the prisons that are second only to the Internet as a venue for bringing in new recruits to the jihadist cause. And the government backed up these plans with real money, canceling approximately a third of the cuts in the French military that had been scheduled to take effect between 2015 and 2020 and vastly increasing the budget of the security services. The costs of doing this and of maintaining the emergency security plan known as “Vigipirate,” which involves a large number of French soldiers patrolling the streets and providing security for institutions thought to be vulnerable to renewed terrorist attack, above all Jewish schools and synagogues, have been enormous—more than a billion euros in only the first two months after the attacks. In March, the French government also announced that it would recruit eleven thousand additional soldiers, a move necessitated by its plans to keep seven thousand soldiers deployed around the country indefinitely to deal with the threat of terrorism. This is the first time since the end of the Algerian War that the French military’s land forces will grow larger rather than smaller. How effective all of this will prove to be is another matter.

And even if these new measures prove successful, they can only mitigate the threat, not remove it. That is why, quite properly, Manuel Valls, France’s prime minister, also announced the government’s commitment to renewed and greatly expanded efforts to instill the Republic’s secular values into the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised young people in the suburban housing estates that ring every major French city, the so-called cités. These are largely French-born youths of Muslim origin, the children and grandchildren of immigrants from the Maghreb and, more recently, from the Sahel countries that were formerly part of France’s colonial empire. These young men—and, as the key role played in Amedy Coulibaly’s radicalization by his girlfriend Hayat Boumeddiene demonstrated (she is said to have joined the Islamic State immediately after the attacks), an increasing number of women—are perceived as the sea in which the jihadists swim. The importance of this cannot be overstated. For the reaction of many young people in these cités (though it is crucial to bear in mind that they do not constitute more than a tiny minority, even of the disaffected young) to the Charlie Hebdo and HyperCacher market attacks was extremely ominous.

It turned out that in suburban classrooms all over France, and among a population only a small fraction of whom would by any stretch of the imagination consider themselves to be pious Muslims, the sentiments of students were often best expressed by another hashtag, #JeNeSuisPasCharlie, rather than by the mainstream mantra of solidarity and identification with the victims of the attacks. Indeed, some seem to feel that the editors of Charlie Hebdo pretty much had it coming for profaning the Prophet. And even for many young people in the cités who sincerely and unambiguously make it clear that they abhor and fiercely repudiate the crimes of the Kouachi brothers, identifying with the victims is a bridge too far.

A common justification these young people offer for their stance goes as follows: Since no one with any power in France seems to have any sympathy for the sufferings of the Palestinian people, why should they care about some cartoonist who, in their eyes, despised Islam and Muslims? The symbolic resonance of this can scarcely be overstated. Has this anti-Zionism morphed into anti-Semitism in immigrant communities in France, as it has throughout Europe? Unquestionably. In the late nineteenth century, August Bebel could say that anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools; in the early twenty-first century, it is the anti-Zionism of fools. And yet, in fairness, it is not only Muslim immigrants who conflate Jewish and Zionist identities. The official Jewish community organizations in France and elsewhere in Europe often exhibit the same confusion. For example, Roger Cukierman, the head of the largest French Jewish community organization, declared in 2014 that “the fight against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism needs to become a national cause” in France.

But while it would be foolish to deny the reality of anti-Semitism among the young of the cités, focusing on it to the exclusion of the material and psychic realities of the lives of these young people would be just as great a distortion. One can illustrate such thinking in the form of an equation: We, the young of Muslim origin, are discriminated against both in housing and in the job market, and constantly harassed by police acting in the name of a French mainstream that denies we are French too. #JeSuisCharlie is the rallying cry of that mainstream. Therefore, we are not Charlie.

THERE IS nothing paranoid about this view of the realities of the French job and real-estate markets for job seekers with Muslim names or whose addresses have postal codes that mark heavily immigrant areas. But here it is important to be clear: the difficulties that French Muslims confront are not unique to France. No doubt the largely Muslim immigrant suburbs that ring most French cities are particularly grim aesthetically, but this is mostly the result of the fervor with which the French urban planners of the 1950s adopted the concepts of Le Corbusier at their most totalitarian. The basic conditions of these cités in terms of employment, schooling and integration into French society is not significantly different from equivalent settings in Britain, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and, these days, the Scandinavian countries too, even though each of these countries has its own model of social integration. This is important to bear in mind because the debate about France has often relied on explanations that present the (undoubted) failures of integration of these new communities into French society as being the inevitable consequence of the country’s particular social cocktail of Republicanism, secularism (laicité), and what purports to be a color-blind model of public policy that is incarnated in a 1978 law that largely prohibits both the collection and storage of race-based data on the French population, leading to French censuses containing no information on race or ethnicity.

Even the pathologies of the “radical losers” such as the Kouachi brothers and Coulibaly, to use Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s inspired description,[1] have nothing particularly French about them. It is true that with hindsight the slaughter at the offices of Charlie Hebdo seems to have been prefigured by two previous attacks claimed by homegrown “lone wolf” Islamic terrorists. The first took place in March 2012 in Toulouse and Montauban, when Mohammed Merah murdered three French soldiers (two of whom were Muslim and all three of whom were of Moroccan or Algerian origin) and then went on to slaughter three Jewish schoolchildren and one of their teachers. The second was the murder of four people at the Jewish Center in Brussels by Mehdi Nemmouche, another young Frenchman of Maghrebi origin, who committed his crime shortly after returning to Europe from Syria, where he had enlisted in the Islamic State and tortured Western hostages held by the group.

But although there is self-evidently something morally problematic about focusing solely on the body counts in terrorist attacks, it is still important to keep in mind that even if one adds all of the victims of these five men together, the number does not come close to the 191 men and women whose lives were extinguished by bombs planted by an Al Qaeda cell in the Atocha train station in Madrid in 2004, or to the fifty-two people who were killed by four British Islamist suicide bombers who detonated themselves aboard three different London underground trains and one London bus in July 2005. And, of course, this does not even include the several failed mass-casualty attacks that are known to have been thwarted in the United Kingdom.

Even if one narrows the frame and excludes London, Atocha and Merah’s killing of the three French soldiers, on the basis of their having been inspired by the terrorists’ belief that they were “avenging” British, Spanish and French military actions in the Muslim world, and then excludes Merah’s attack on the Jewish school in Toulouse, Nemmouche’s on the Jewish Center in Brussels and Coulibaly’s on the kosher supermarket in Paris as having been motivated by rabid Jew-hatred, and only includes those attacks that seem to have been motivated by the wish to “avenge” perceived blasphemy against Islam, neither of the two important precursors to the Charlie Hebdo attacks had any relation to France. The hacking to death in Amsterdam in 2004 of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was the work of Mohammed Bouyeri, a young Dutch-Moroccan dual national who claimed to be avenging the slurs against Islam van Gogh had supposedly made in his film Submission. And a series of attempts to murder Kurt Westergaard, on the grounds that the Danish cartoonist had profaned the image of the Prophet by drawing him with a bomb in his turban, along with plots against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that had published his cartoon, were undertaken by immigrants of North African or Somali origin residing in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

It is also noteworthy that the most significant terrorist attack in Europe since the Charlie Hebdo massacre took place not in France but in Denmark, when Omar El-Hussein, a Danish-born immigrant of Palestinian origin, opened fire (killing one person) on a meeting at a cultural center in Copenhagen entitled “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression,” at which the French ambassador was a speaker. The meeting had been meant to reflect on the implications of the Charlie Hebdo killings on the future of free speech. The following morning, El-Hussein turned his sights (literally) on Copenhagen’s Great Synagogue, where he gunned down Dan Uzan, a congregant who had volunteered to act as a security guard during the bat mitzvah celebration that was being held there.

Still, for all its pan-European features, the French case somehow does seem worse. To paraphrase Trotsky on war, France may not be interested in ethnicity, but ethnicity is interested in France. What happens in, say, Denmark, no matter how significant in human terms, is marginal to the social and political future of Europe, whereas what happens in France is central to it. And if the future of France is truly as bleak as recent opinion polls suggest the French believe it to be, then this is likely to doom the postwar European project as well, even if Germany remains the rock of probity and stability its admirers (and its own political class) conceive it as being.

For understandable reasons, what that future will be like is couched for larger and larger numbers of French people in terms of the loyalty or disloyalty of French Muslims to the French state and to Republican, secular values. The steady rise of the National Front (FN) testifies to this. Under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, who strikes many informed observers (including a fair number who loathe and fear her) as the most talented figure in contemporary French politics, the FN has become the leading party of what remains of the French industrial working class. In contrast, the question for many, if not most, immigrants and their French-born children and grandchildren is whether French society will ever stop discriminating against them and offer them a fair chance at a decent future.

LOST IN all this, however, is the fact that well before the incompatibility between the values of Muslim immigrants and the values of the Republic began to be adduced as the principal reason to be pessimistic about France’s future, the French were already increasingly apprehensive about their country’s prospects. According to a BVA-Gallup poll conducted in 2010 for the daily Le Parisien, the French were in fact more pessimistic than any other people on earth (the most optimistic were the Vietnamese). “France, world champions of pessimism” was the way the weekly Le Point put it. The author of the BVA-Gallup survey, Céline Bracq, drew from this the conclusion that the real “French exception” (the term typically refers to special state subsidies for culture that have been in place since the time when the great French writer André Malraux was Charles de Gaulle’s minister of culture) is pessimism.

Why such pessimism has become so deeply ingrained in France’s collective psyche is not always easy to understand. It is all very well to speak, as many informed commentators rightly do, of France’s institutional sclerosis, and of the self-reproducing, hermetic character of its elite, many of whom were formed in a small number of elite educational institutions, above all the École Nationale d’Administration (Nicolas Sarkozy was, interestingly enough, an exception to this; Hollande is not). But in many crucial areas, France in fact works better than either its European neighbors or the United States and Canada. While it has its flaws, French medical care is about as good a system as it is possible to construct. French factories continue to produce industrial goods, and the country is a world leader in high-speed rail, advanced military technology and nuclear power plants. Unlike most OECD countries, the French birthrate remains above replacement level, and not only, as in the United States, because of immigration, but also thanks to extremely successful natalist policies.

In reality, it is not so much that things are actually worse in France—and even with regard to the Muslim immigrant question, one can plausibly argue that despite Charlie Hebdo, it remains considerably better in France than in the United Kingdom—but rather that France’s acute obsession with its own identity has morphed from the dialectical (France as compared with other countries) to the autarchic (France turned inward on itself). Geoffrey Wheatcroft offered an apt encapsulation of this in an essay provocatively titled “Liberté, Fraternité, Morosité.” “Not long ago,” he wrote, “France had a hang-up about America. Now, France has a hang-up about France.”

Even a cursory look at the nonfiction titles featured in most French bookstores would seem to vindicate Wheatcroft’s analysis. What has changed over the past fifteen years is that today’s successful books have a much more bitter and violent character to them. At the turn of the century, most of the popular books in this genre were focused on France’s political dysfunction and its economic sclerosis; today the obsession is with political Islam and whether France can even survive. Consider Éric Zemmour’s Le Suicide Français, a polemic that basically argues that France has been destroyed by the children of May 1968, the feminists and the Eurocrats, and is now being engulfed by Muslim immigrants who, thanks to the perfidy of the elite, will soon be in control. The book is so extreme that even Marine Le Pen has distanced herself from it.

The French author and columnist Marc Weitzmann differs from Zemmour in crucial ways and has done yeoman service by writing several newspaper columns in which he outlines the myriad ways in which Le Suicide Français is a malign falsification of French history, above all the history of what happened to both native-born and foreign Jews in France during the Second World War (among its other charms, Zemmour’s book contains a ringing defense of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy regime). Morally, he could not be further removed from Zemmour. And yet Weitzmann’s tone can be almost as apocalyptic about the fate of France as Zemmour’s. Le Suicide Français ends with the pronouncement that “France is dead.” Weitzmann emphatically considers Zemmour an emblem of the pathological nature of the contemporary debate, and yet he concluded “France’s Toxic Hate,” a five-part series he did for the American Jewish magazine Tablet on the return of French anti-Semitism, with a jeremiad that is only a shade less dark than Zemmour’s, though it focused specifically on the bleakness of the realities French Jewry will face in the future. “Caught between the stale remainders of pro-Arab power politics,” Weitzmann wrote, “leftist rhetoric, and the ghosts of World War II, French Jews [are] beginning their journey into civic loneliness. The neurotic, historical, and ideological dead ends in which the French have dealt with anti-Semitism ever since are an impossible mental context in which to think or simply to live, for the Jews, and for France.”

Is the situation really that bad? Weitzmann is certainly not the only serious French intellectual to think so. Indeed, he is joined in this view by Alain Finkielkraut, who, whether or not one agrees with his views, is indisputably one of France’s leading cultural figures. For at least a decade, Finkielkraut has argued that the French elite in general, and the bien-pensant left-leaning cultural elite in particular, have been too cowardly, too much in denial, too obtuse or too self-interested (or all four!) to think, let alone speak and write, honestly about the Islamic barbarism festering, or, worse, being allowed and even encouraged to flourish by a pusillanimous state bureaucracy. In previous generations, his argument goes, the schools successfully imparted Republican, secular values—including to the poor and immigrants. But today, Finkielkraut insists, out of fear of being branded racists for standing up for French culture and French values, the schools no longer have the will or, for that matter, the capability of doing so. Instead, political correctness rules, leading to what Finkielkraut has called “the great deculturation” of France.

Guilt over colonialism and the triumph of cultural relativism are the constitutive elements of a new “treason of the intellectuals” that has consigned the French assimilationist ideal to oblivion and barbarism. The emblem of this barbarism is the revival of anti-Semitism in France. Anyone doubting this need only look at the initial media coverage of Amedy Coulibaly’s rampage in the HyperCacher supermarket. At first, it was reported that he had stumbled into the market by accident. In fact, Coulibaly, a virulent anti-Semite, seems to have known exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing. The stark fact is that killing Jews has been a priority for the terrorists in most of the recent jihadist attacks in Europe. The flag of convenience for this is Palestine. For example, Mohammed Merah said he had chosen to kill French soldiers because of what the French army was doing in Afghanistan but that he had attacked the Jewish school in Toulouse because “the Jews kill our brothers and sisters in Palestine.” A jihadist video recording released after Coulibaly’s death boasted that he had killed a policewoman and “five Jews.” And in Copenhagen, Omar El-Hussein seems to have moved seamlessly from avenging the Prophet against the cartoonists to opening fire on the Grand Synagogue.

For Finkielkraut and Weitzmann, the true culpability of the French elite lies in its refusal to confront the hard realities of the present age. Both men would agree with the great French conservative intellectual of the first part of the twentieth century, Charles Péguy, that “it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” On this account, the existential challenge for France becomes how to get its courage back.

BUT IT’S doubtful that the resolutely culturalist explanation that Finkielkraut in particular has set out offers anything like the explanatory key that he assumes it does. Somewhat (but only somewhat) simplified, it goes as follows: France stands for certain values; it is a moral imperative to transmit these values, both for the sake of the country and for the sake of French Muslim children; thus, any failure to do so is a moral as well as a social and cultural catastrophe; but that failure is not just in the process of occurring, it has already occurred; as a result, in the deepest sense, the France that is noble, the France that is worth admiring, preserving and emulating, has died, in large measure by its own hand; and so the new Dark Ages loom.

Stripped of their tone of lachrymose self-congratulation, not to mention apocalyptic soothsaying (in how many generations have aging philosophers confronting their own actuarial realities insisted that we were living at the end of the world?), Finkielkraut’s arguments against political correctness are by no means completely misguided.[2] And his suggestion that schools should above all focus on the teaching of the French language is unquestionably right. The problem is that his culturalist explanation leads him to mistake a byproduct of the current crisis France confronts for the essence of that crisis. The solutions he offers—a return to Republicanism, an end to apologizing for Western culture, a willingness to confront and oppose radical Islam—are not so much wrong as they are irrelevant. The fundamental problems of France are not mainly the product of cultural capitulation but rather the result of the transformations of the world economy that make any return to Finkielkraut’s beloved cultural and moral status quo ante a total impossibility. For while such romantic nationalism may have a distinguished pedigree (Finkielkraut is in many ways the rightful heir to Péguy in this regard), and even today remains a perfectly coherent position intellectually, it has no answers to any of the problems posed by economic globalization and mass migration.

For the culturalist, materialist arguments simply do not resonate. Fix French culture, Finkielkraut seems to be saying, and France will flourish; fail to fix it and France will fall. It is, to put it charitably, a very French conceit (one that Weitzmann emphatically does not share), but it simply will not do. Is there a crisis of confidence in Western culture among the European elite? Unquestionably. And is there a crisis of the Muslim “community” in France? Probably. But even if the answer is yes, it is a qualified yes. There is a crisis of jihadist recruitment in prisons, but there is no crisis of loyalty among the increasingly significant proportion of the ordinary soldiers and noncommissioned officers who make up the French army. And, as Rony Brauman asked in a column in Le Monde, why is Amedy Coulibaly seen by many as more of a “real” Muslim than Lassana Bathily, a worker at the HyperCacher market who at great personal risk saved both customers and workers at the store, most if not all of them Jews? The reason should be obvious: by now many French people believe that a violent Islam is far more authentic than an accommodationist one.

Even here, the reluctance of French intellectuals to think comparatively is extraordinary. For example, they never make an effort to situate the fact that young people are being attracted to the Islamic State and Al Qaeda in a global context. And yet it seems perfectly obvious that had the Kouachi brothers grown up in Mexico or Guatemala and had the same delinquent profiles, they would have drifted instead toward the narcotrafficking gangs, whose record of heartless savagery (videotaping torture, including not just decapitation but the flaying alive of victims) is every bit the equal of the Islamic State’s. And if Amedy Coulibaly and Hayat Boumeddiene had been white teenagers in suburban America with the same delinquent profiles, they might well have wound up among the ranks of those carrying out school shootings in the United States. To insist on this point is not the same thing as claiming the jihadists, the foot soldiers of the cartels and the shooters at Columbine have identical motivations. But it is to say that all three resemble each other far more than they differ: they are death cults, and losing sight of this—as so many in France who see in assassins like the Kouachi brothers the shape of a civil war that Éric Zemmour clearly believes has already begun and that the Muslims are going to win—is a mistake.

How would teaching immigrant kids about the greatness of Racine and Corneille have any effect on any of these questions? What Finkielkraut and others who share his view can’t seem to face is that their piety toward the French past was the product of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s—the trente glorieuses, or “thirty glorious years,” as they have come to be known in France—which is to say of an entirely different historical context, one in which the nation-state had not yet been hollowed out by the globalization of both the economy and the culture, and at a time of extraordinary economic expansion in which working-class people were able to lead relatively comfortable lives for the first time in French history.

At present, lower-middle-class and poor people in France have fewer and fewer opportunities and less and less reason for hope. And it should go without saying that at this historical juncture, young people of immigrant backgrounds have the least hope of all. This does not mean they are becoming terrorists en masse or want to install the caliphate in the Élysée and turn Notre-Dame into a mosque, or indeed to fulfill any of Zemmour’s or novelist Michel Houellebecq’s other paranoid, racist fantasies. But it does mean that many of them are unwilling to take the claims that France makes for itself at face value. A cultural and political elite less enamored of itself would spend less time bemoaning the cultural barbarism and social backwardness of the immigrant young, get off its plinth, and spend far more time trying to figure out how to make France less of a totem and more of a society in which the young feel they have a stake.

David Rieff is the author of ten books, including At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (Simon & Schuster, 2005). His forthcoming book, The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the 21st Century, will be published by Simon & Schuster in October.

[1] I am indebted to Ian Buruma for pointing out this connection in a piece he wrote in Le Monde after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

[2] However, the contrast between Finkielkraut’s severities toward the communitarian impulses of French Muslims and his indulgent views toward the communitarianism of their Jewish fellow citizens would seem to call the authenticity of his Republicanism into question. Marc Weitzmann’s view seems to be that since Jewish communal institutions are not “secessionist,” and, indeed, were created by the French state during the Napoleonic era, they cannot be communitarian in the negative sense in which that term is used in France today.

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