In the wake of the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015, millions took to the streets to demonstrate their revulsion, expressing a desire to reaffirm the ideals of the French Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité. But who were the millions of demonstrators who were suddenly united under the single cry of ‘Je suis Charlie’?

In this probing new book, Emmanuel Todd investigates the cartography and sociology of the three to four million who marched in Paris and across France and draws some unsettling conclusions. For while they claimed to support liberal, republican values, the real middle classes who marched on that day of indignant protest also had a quite different programme in mind, one that was far removed from their proclaimed ideal. Their deep values were in fact more reminiscent of the most depressing aspects of France’s national history: conservatism, selfishness, domination and inequality.

By identifying the anthropological, religious, economic and political forces that brought France to the edge of the abyss, Todd reveals the real dangers posed to all western societies when the interests of privileged middle classes work against marginalised and immigrant groups. Should we really continue to mistreat young people, force the children of immigrants to live on the outskirts of our cities, consign the poorer classes to the remoter parts of the country, demonise Islam, and allow the growth of an ever more menacing anti-Semitism? While asking uncomfortable questions and offering no easy solutions, Todd points to the difficult and uncertain path that might lead to an accommodation with Islam rather than a deepening and divisive confrontation.

Emmanuel Todd is an historian and sociologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), Paris.

Preface to the English edition

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: A religious crisis
The terminal crisis in Catholicism
Religious decline and the rise of xenophobia
Catholic France and secular France: 1750-1960
The two Frances and equality
From the One God to the single currency
François Hollande, the Left, and zombie Catholicism
2005: a missed opportunity in class struggle?
Difficult atheism

CHAPTER TWO: Charlie
Charlie: middle class and zombie Catholics
Neo-republicanism
1992-2015: from pro-Europeanism to neo-republicanism
The neo-republican reality: the ‘social state’ of the middle classes
Charlie is anxious
Secularism versus the Left
Catholicism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism

CHAPTER THREE: When equality fails
The difficulties of secular, egalitarian France
The anthropology of a capitalism in crisis
The Europe of inequality
France, the Germans and the Arabs
Germany and circumcision
The great pro-European happening of 11 January 2015
Russia: an exceptional case
The mystery of Paris
The memory of places
The four stages of the crisis

CHAPTER IV: The French of the Far Right
The slow march of the National Front towards the centre ground in France
A perversion of universalism
Republican anti-Semitism
Le Pen, Sarkozy and equality
The Socialist Party and inequality: the concept of objective xenophobia
Mélenchon and inequality
The insignificance of human beings and the violence of ideologies

CHAPTER FIVE: The French Muslims
The disintegration of North African cultures
Mixed marriages: Jews and Muslims
Ideologues and exogamy
The crushing of young people and the jihad factory
Scottish fundamentalism
Moving beyond the fear of religion
Islam and equality
The inequality of the sexes
The anti-Semitism of the suburbs

Conclusion
The real republican past
The neo-republican present
Future 1: Confrontation
Future 2: the return to the Republic: an accommodation with Islam
A foreseeable deterioration
The secret weapon of the republican revival