Anatomy of a Slip of the Tongue

Against the backdrop of a social movement marked by multiple acts of violence involving various actors, an attack occurred that instantly elevated the violence to an entirely new level. On October 23, in Trappes and La Verrière, a man opened fire on passersby who, according to preliminary findings of the investigation, were targeted based on their skin color or origin. Pengo Bossio Wangi, 26, was killed, and five people were wounded, some seriously, including a 12-year-old girl.

The consequences of the far right’s current hold on public opinion are plain for all to see. The rhetoric it spreads serves as the motivational backdrop for the perpetrators of racist crimes—murderous acts that, in the French social context as elsewhere in Europe, target Muslims and postcolonial minorities. These crimes take the form of both individual murders and mass killings. Until the 2020s, this type of crime—attacks or murders inspired by the far right—had become rare. Extreme violence, with targets selected based on their presumed origins, had been directed primarily at Jews since the early 2000s, and it did not originate from this camp. In recent years, Christians have also been targeted simply for being Christian. To say, as the President of the Republic did in Trappes, that “this is the first time there has been a terrorist act planned to kill our fellow citizens, our children, because of the color of their skin or the religion they were raised in” is factually incorrect. Undoubtedly, the statement was intended to underscore the extreme gravity of the events. Strong words had to be spoken by the highest authority of the State, at the very site of the attack and in the presence of the victims. But why did it have to come at the cost of a falsehood? On the contrary, the unprecedented nature of the event should have been described as accurately as possible. With these words, that very goal was missed; the omission came across as a slip of the tongue just as unacceptable as Raymond Barre’s during the Rue Copernic attack, when he distinguished between Jewish victims and “innocent French people.” Uttered from the highest level of government, the statement obviously calls for interpretation, as the slip of the tongue cannot—in this case less than anywhere else—be devoid of intention. Behind every slip of the tongue lies an unconscious wish. Let us assume that it has less to do with the President as a person than with the reality of the country. This reality is shaped by a distinction that is indeed relevant: racist crimes are of one kind, antisemitic crimes of another. However overwhelmed he may have been by the intensity of the event, the President of the Republic could not have been unaware of this.

Minorities Caught in Political Polarization

Racism is widespread, but it is on the far right that its power is concentrated; there, in recent years, it has resumed the persecutory and murderous course that was common from the 1960s to the 1980s, as the country emerged from the colonial wars where racism and state violence had gone hand in hand, and at a time when French public opinion, for the most part, had not accepted decolonization, much less understood it for what it was—namely, a decisive step forward in the emancipation of peoples. Discrimination and racial prejudice—with very real effects in terms of social inequalities in employment, health, culture, housing, education, and relations with public authorities, whether in their role of protection or law enforcement—have persisted in the intervening years since that period. Racist crimes occurred, some of which were fatal. But as for attacks and mass killings that were strictly racist in nature—regardless of who committed them—they were no longer a current issue.

The same could not be said of antisemitic crimes. Antisemitism—a backdrop of negative opinions about Jews that fuels acts of violence, is widespread throughout society—neither the far left nor the far right is immune to it, nor, above all, are those segments of the population whose members, without being affiliated with either side, view Jews as agents of an intolerable domination of which they consider themselves victims, particularly through what they perceive as their “racialization.” As a result, the hate crimes targeting Jews since the early 2000s have all been committed by individuals from postcolonial minority backgrounds, with more or less close ties to Islamism as an openly embraced murderous doctrine; and the far right, while continuing to fuel antisemitism ideologically—and at times strengthening its ties to far-left antisemitism, which also has deep roots—has not been involved in such crimes.

The far right experienced its strongest growth by pursuing this trajectory. For the far right, winning over increasingly broad segments of public opinion required promoting public racism as a reasonable vision of the proper composition of national society and providing it with a coherent political expression. In other words, it meant reclaiming racism as a formula for cultural and ethnic purification (with the balance between the two criteria varying) capable of reviving nationalism. Capitalizing on the political camps’ failure to address the question of the nation—the lack of reflection on its sociological and political redefinition, in a context of increased European integration and global interdependence—the far right staked its entire credibility on this point. And the gamble, as we know, paid off. Verbal stigmatization and overt xenophobia, doctrinal culturalist racism, and virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric have thus come to shape a rigid, insular conception of national identity—one around which the “normalized” far-right political party National Rally (RN) has been able to thrive and grow, without this violence ever needing to be “carried out” by far-right activists. On the other hand, what was essential was to attribute physical violence to the enemy of the nation, whose image was obsessively redrawn.

Objective violence against Jews—that which is de facto expressed in crimes committed by individuals from postcolonial minorities—has thus served as a favored argument for denouncing attacks on the pacified national order. Admittedly, as all surveys show, far-right antisemitism—which portrays Jews as the corrupters of the nation and as transnational agents operating in the shadows—has not disappeared; but it is kept in the background so that attention is focused not so much on the corruptors as on the alleged violent destroyers of the nation itself, whose defense is a struggle that is presented as both patriotic and civilizational.

This movement to normalize the far right—achieved by using Jews as a scapegoat and at the expense of postcolonial minorities—has been mirrored by another movement, also fueled by the failure to adequately address the national question on the part of a large segment of the left, for whom consideration of integration issues and growing inequalities in access to social rights—education, work, health, and culture—neglected by a weakened welfare state—has been subordinated to a critique of domination, a critique whose spearhead was drawn from the plight of postcolonial minorities, a plight indeed burdened by growing injustices. That they, too, are being instrumentalized—but this time by a segment of the left, and under the guise of defending their cause—in order to avoid addressing the sociological and political problem of integration is perhaps the aspect of the situation that is least often highlighted. It is by no means the least important.

Revisiting the national question today requires considerable effort, given the internal and external transformations that European states are undergoing. Specifically, it requires a nuanced and relational understanding of the groups that actually make up the nation, as well as the class relations that run through them—or, to put it another way, of how these groups conceive of their identity within the national community, alongside their socioeconomic composition. Faced with this complexity, the way in which the critique of domination takes precedence over critique in general serves as a shortcut that allows one to avoid the necessary work. It paves the way for a demagoguery that has become entrenched and has grown steadily within the left, plunging the social-democratic camp—which, by definition, cannot come to terms with it—into a deep crisis. If we are to judge by the resurgence this camp has experienced in recent months—the Socialist Party primary was a sign of this, building on what had begun during the last European elections—this realization seems to be on the agenda. But the gap to be bridged is so vast that the situation is unlikely to be rectified. For what has prevailed thus far is the polarization between a far right that has appropriated the discourse on national unity, and a radical left that counters with the argument of the “new France”—a supposedly rising force destined to overturn the relationship between minority and majority. And once again, there is a victim who—given the proven rise in antisemitic acts during this period—is by no means merely collateral: the Jews, confusingly linked to “Zionism,” upon which all accusations can be heaped as a focal point for struggles against the ruling classes in general—a target that is conveniently sharpened whenever the need arises.

The Center: The Third Pole of Polarization

To this polarization—in which all minorities lose, albeit in different ways and for distinct reasons—the ruling power has never offered the slightest response in ten years. Rather, it can be said that it has perpetuated this polarization, revealing its ideological inconsistency with increasing clarity. Its only positive impetus has never resided anywhere other than in a liberal creed shrouded in pragmatism and devoid of political significance. And this impetus quickly fizzled out as the crisis of liberalism intensified economically and socially across the whole of Europe. The increasingly evident inability of this movement to present a common vision for national societies—whether considered individually or united within Europe—has engulfed the central bloc and reduced it to an exclusively defensive posture. This, in turn, has turned it into an agent of the very polarization it sought to resolve by transcending it.

As for how to address the crucial problem that this three-way—rather than two-way—dynamic continually reignites—namely, the relationship of minorities to one another and to the majority viewpoint (which, provided it constantly redefines itself, bears the burden of overall social and political integration)—this bloc was utterly incapable of doing so. Consequently, it never ceased to waver, offering conciliatory remarks in one direction or the other, giving to some only to signify what it was taking away from others, as if to refer them back to their own confrontation, in which it itself was not a party. A “sovereign” position in the trivial sense of the term—and therefore, in truth, a very weak one. This is evidenced by the panic with which this government reacted when a protest movement—which, alongside high school students, presented itself as social criticism in its purest form, that is, in support of a social right, public education, currently devalued and under attack—had the audacity to oppose its policies.

The President of the Republic’s statement fits into the pattern of shifting rhetoric for which he is known. He commits an injustice by omission, while at the same time allowing a grain of truth to slip through: yes, we are indeed witnessing a “turning point,” or more precisely, the acceleration of an already pronounced trend—that is, the crossing of a threshold—in that the accusatory and stigmatizing rhetoric of the far right is leading to racist murders of striking violence and scale. It should be noted that a threshold is not exactly a turning point, but the nuance, to be honest, matters little. It suffices to acknowledge that the advances of reactionary nationalism are indeed increasingly unleashing murderous racism, against the backdrop of social movements and the violence that is variously intensified by the different poles of polarization. From now on, these racist murders are added to the antisemitic murders of the past two decades. But they do so without being conflated with them. The gravity of both is equal—absolutely equal—from the universalist perspective that guides the integration of minorities into a national society constituted as a state governed by the rule of law. Yet this integration can only be addressed consistently if the real tensions from which the violence stems are distinguished and related to the overall social configuration that makes them possible. Such a perspective cannot emerge at any point as long as politics remains structured by the current polarizing forces. These poles form a triangle at the heart of which the void deepens a little more each day—a void that those who retain some clarity of thought observe with desolation. Everything therefore hinges, on this issue as on others, on the reconfiguration of a social-democratic position and on the renewal of what is meant by republicanism.

As for the mistake of treating what has just occurred as a first-of-its-kind crime based on perceived phenotype or attributed religion, it is an expression of the predicament faced by the third pole of polarization—not the left, not the right, but the center—which is forced to oscillate constantly, that is, to alternately prioritize one of the ills suffered by one segment of society over the other, taking the calculated risk of highlighting it only at the expense of another. The risk materialized immediately. The president of the National Rally was able to remind the head of state of the children at the Ozar Hatorah school and the victims of the Hyper Cacher attack, thereby returning to his favorite argument. The two presidential clarifications that followed merely replayed the oscillation rather than correcting it: the Élysée first specified that only skin color was being targeted, reestablishing the distinction between the crimes at the cost of half a sentence; the President then wrote that no suffering should be ranked, dissolving the distinction into the equivalence of all suffering. That this may be a short-term electoral strategy—between two unreasonable extremes, the only reasonable position would be that of “at the same time,” which reaffirms itself by contradicting itself—is likely; but it is merely the surface through which the wish of the slip of the tongue passes—that of a position which subsists only in relation to two other poles and requires their confrontation to last indefinitely. The little phrase will then have been something entirely other than a late-stage error, a misstep due to carelessness or fatigue. Merely a desperate attempt to issue a testamentary directive: “Let us stick to the political void on which we continue to live; let us therefore simply wait for crimes to follow crimes, and social violence to follow social violence.” The greatest acts of racist and antisemitic violence, alternately, and precisely not “at the same time.”