And every time France is attacked, a particular kind of sorrow overcomes me. In the late 1980s, motivated by a love of French literature, I spent a year in Paris studying the language at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, paying my way by tutoring French university students in English.

I had a good time with the young French people I taught. Many of them were around my age – in their mid-20s – and I was often invited to their homes or out to a restaurant for meal. They were of all backgrounds – Caucasian, north African, from Paris or the provinces – and they fascinated me. Here they were, the future custodians of French society and culture, learning English to stay competitive in the newly globalising economy. I, on the other hand, was mesmerised by their language and its legacy.

These days, France figures most prominently in my life via my book collection. My French books don’t take up the biggest space on my shelves: it’s the combined literatures of the Anglosphere that do. But French literature and thought is without a doubt the literature that has had the most influence on me as a novelist and academic.

I can’t imagine life without writers like Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, and more recently Michel Houellebecq. To contemporary sensibilities that may bristle at this somewhat canonical list, what can I say? If there was ever a literary canon worth establishing, it’s the French.

Marguerite Duras Wikimedia Commons

What is it that draws me again and again to this body of work? If I could pin it down at all, I’d say it was because the French novel has a quality that manages to blend social critique, personal struggle, entertainment and aesthetics in a unique way.

Underpinning all these elements is a formidable, nuanced irony, a kind of knowing wink to human weakness, that engine room of the tragic, the force that drives all our triumphs and failures.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. Emile Zola is best known for individual novels such as Germinal, Nana, and La Bête humaine. What is less known is that these books form part of a monumental 20-novel saga known as Les Rougon-Macquart series, in which he traces the natural and social history of a family of France’s second empire. Standing on the shoulders of his hero, Balzac, and his monumental La Comédie humaine, Zola trains a forensic eye on the foibles of his times, France in the second half of the 19th century.

Émile Zola Nadar, via Wikimedia Commons

Telling ironies abound in Zola: in tone, at the level of daily observation, but perhaps most importantly at the level of story premise. Nowhere is this better illustrated in his novel Nana, where we view Paris society through the tale of the courtesan/actress Nana, whose rise and fall provides insights into the moral and political climate of the times. But it’s also the success of novels like Nana – it sold 55,000 copies on the first day of publication in 1870 – that bears testament to how French literature could conduct a critique of French society with style and panache, and also be a hit with a public hungry for critical appraisals of society entertainingly told.

This was the France of nearly one-and-a-half centuries ago, a France that could never have dreamed of what was to become of its empire, nor forseen a time when nearly one tenth of the population would be Muslim, as it is today.

Mordant satire

Yet the spirit of critique lives on in their literature, most famously for Anglophone audiences in the form of novelist Michel Houellebecq’s mordant satires on French society. In a spirit arguably less nuanced than his canonical predecessors like Balzac and Zola, Houellebecq’s critiques are idiosyncratic and goading, testament as much to his dsyfunctional personality as they are to a desire to reveal potent ironies that speak to the times.

Michel Houellebecq in 2008. Mariusz Kubik/Wikimedia Commons

Nowhere is this sensiblity clearer than in his most recent novel, Submission, where irony of premise is well to the foreground. In the France of 2022, an Islamic party has taken power via the ballot box, and France finds itself on the path to Islamisation. Our hero is the Parisian academic François, a scholar of the great 19th century author of decadence, Huysmans.

Confronted with the new status quo, and disaffected with the hollow freedoms of Western culture, François finds himself lured by a world that reestablishes a clear-cut moral order and that, best of all, allows him to have multiple wives.
In an occurrence that could only be described as a freak accident of timing, Submission was published on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack, with that magazine’s current issue sporting Michel Houellebecq on the cover. The novel went on to become a bestseller in Europe and the English speaking world. Once again the spirit of French critique ­– this time a darker, more troubled one – found itself connecting with a national, and global, audience.

Houellebecq’s near-future satire is his commentary on the France of today. This is a France at a crossroads, caught between the historical and ongoing tug-of-war between Europe and Islam, between the desire to remain true to its legacy of liberty, equality and fraternity and the need to recognise that it has become a multi-cultural society that has to extend these values to all.

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo EPA/IAN LANGSDON

How can France succeed in this juggling act? It’s a question that’s currently being posed to other European countries – Germany, Belgium, Great Britain – that have all become recent targets of Islamic extremists.

Whenever these attacks occur, I think back to the young French people whose hospitality I enjoyed nearly 30 years ago. No doubt many of them, like me, will have taken up their places contributing to their professions, will have their own families, will be endeavouring to make themselves useful and happy. Sadly they’ve inherited a world where, for a variety of complex reasons, they find their fellow citizens either being mowed down by a rented truck as they watch the Bastille Day fireworks, or shot down in the stalls of a retro theatre during a rock concert.

In these dark days of extremist violence, literature seems to offer few answers or consolations. But its spirit of critique, pioneered so brilliantly by the French, is certainly worth keeping up the fight for.

(Author is Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Technology Sydney)

Courtesy: The Conversation

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A police officer watches people gathering around a floral tribute for the victims killed during a deadly attack, on the famed Boulevard des Anglais in Nice, southern France, July 17, 2016. Laurent Cipriani /Press Association. All rights reserved.

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Another attack hit French soil last week, confirming that the country is at present Europe's number-one terrorism hotspot. At around 10.30pm, a large white truck was driven by a young man for two kilometres along the packed Promenade des Anglais in the French Riviera city of Nice, crushing everyone in its way.

The result was a massacre in which at last 84 people, including several children, died. They had gathered to watch the fireworks display on France's national day. Hundreds of people were also injured, some of them very seriously. The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old French-Tunisian resident in Nice, was shot dead inside the vehicle. Bouhlel was known to the police for petty crimes, but not to the intelligence services.

The circumstances of this carnage, in a popular resort near the peak of the holiday season, carry high symbolism. For Nice was commemorating the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the foundational event of the French revolution. The day also marks the Fȇte de la Fédération in 1790, celebrating the end of tyrannical rule and the beginning of republican monarchy. The massacre was thus perpetrated at a moment when the unity of the French nation, and the three tenets of its republican motto —liberté, égalité, fraternité — are of special significance. 
 

There is still a lack of understanding of why these actions continue and of what al-Qaida, ISIS and other Islamist paramilitary groups really are.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre in Nice, saying a 'soldier' carried out the attack. In the last few weeks the group has repeatedly called for such attacks. Moreover, ISIS media channels soon began to release celebratory statements and other material about what happened in Nice. The same hashtags used to post updates on Twitter, #Pray for Nice and #Nice06, have been used by ISIS supporters to flood Twitter with pro-ISIS propaganda. For example, the following notice was posted on the al-minbar forum: “This is the beginning of the attack to take holy revenge for the killing of Abu Omar Shishani, may Allah accept him”.

The radicalisation lens
Nice is the latest of many massacres that, since the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, have contributed to the global state of insecurity being experienced worldwide. Yet there is still a lack of understanding of why these actions continue and of what al-Qaida, ISIS and other Islamist paramilitary groups really are.

To remedy that, there needs to be profound and critical reflection on the failure to understand these phenomena. One of the biggest obstacles to understanding is to be found in the fact that both experts and laypeople tend to view groups like ISIS as an existential threat in its own right. However, as Paul Rogers suggests in many of his openDemocracy columns, such groups should rather be seen as symptoms of a much bigger and more complex situation characterised by irregular warfare.

In this light, al-Qaida, ISIS and similar paramilitary groups reflect a wider global insecurity whose real drivers, in Rogers's words, are: “deepening socio-economic divisions, which lead to the relative marginalisation of most people across the world, and the prospect of profound and lasting environmental constraints, caused by climate change. ISIS, in short, should be seen as a warning of what could be to come, not as a fundamental trend in its own right”.

Rogers emphasises that “ISIS is an example of a revolt from the margins”. That is why there is not and cannot be a military solution to terrorism. Today, it now widely in both academic and policy circles that the so-called "war on terror" has brought far more harm than good. But hard military approaches to counter-terrorism continue to be prevalent worldwide, while soft-power approaches remain the exception rather than the rule.

To be fair, European and American policymakers have shown a lot of interest in counter-radicalisation policies aimed at preventing violent extremism among targeted (mainly Muslim) groups. But most of these policies have been badly designed and implemented, and as such they undermined the trust of Muslim communities. By making the latter feel stigmatised, these policies had the opposite effect to those intended. Here, the problem resides in the way ‘radicalisation’ is understood.
 

More effort should be made to understand the wider picture—or to use a medical metaphor, the social disease of which the now frequent attacks are a symptom.

Simon Cottee argues that radicalisation is seen: “as a gradual process in which people adopt ever more extreme postures and beliefs. […] ‘Radicalization,’ viewed from this perspective, is a process of self-transformation, where the transformed person comes to view themselves and the outside world in a fundamentally different light. […] The assumption is that while not all radicals become terrorists, all terrorists are radicals.” But, Cottee continues, recent cases seem to challenge this assumption and raise troubling questions: “What if they were not ‘radicalised’ and underwent no dramatic metamorphosis at all?”, and “What if the script of terrorism doesn’t always feature the drama of radicalization?”

The wider picture
Different scholars and analysts have given very diverse explanations of the genesis of terrorist acts and the drivers behind them. All probably have elements of truth, but none fully grasps which social and psychological paths push individuals to take action in the name of a violent extremist organisation.

After events such as Nice, the need for a profound and critical rethinking of the current counter-terrorism approach is more pressing than ever. A good start would be for policymakers and academics to admit that the current global security situation is extremely complex, and that there are no quick fixes.

It should also be made explicit once for all that a kinetic approach to counter-terrorism is not and will not be the solution. Instead, more effort should be made to understand the wider picture—or to use a medical metaphor, the social disease of which the now frequent attacks are a symptom. On that foundation, the real challenge is to devise effective and sustainable strategies able to reverse the hard military approach that has dominated counter-terrorism up to now.

(Valentina Bartolucci is adjunct lecturer at the University of Pisa, Italy)

Courtesy: Open Democracy

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The sickening carnage in Nice has become all too familiar and seemingly impossible to counter. It is unclear exactly who carried out the attack or what their motives were at this stage.

Various government ministers in France have been lining up to declare “war” on the perpetrators. But given the seemingly endless supply of young men and occasionally even young women prepared to blow themselves up in the name of a cause, the chances of dealing effectively with the problem of homegrown radicals look increasingly implausible.

For me, having spent the last six months living in France it became evident that the lives of many young men in predominantly segregated migrant communities were blighted, in comparison with many other, longer-standing members of French society at least.

France has a long and often painful historical relationship with its former colonies and there are no doubt reasons that many Algerians, for example, might feel aggrieved about France’s impact on their country, society and place in the world. They might also feel unhappy about their relative status in their new homeland. But being able to migrate to France is still a pretty good option for those able to take it.

Or it was. The reality is that many of the things that made France such an attractive and iconic place are being steadily eroded. It is no coincidence that Bastille Day was chosen for this atrocity. Apart from the many, densely packed strangers readily available for slaughter, there was the added symbolism of the day itself.

France occupies a unique place in the history of Western civilisation in particular and “civilised” values more generally. There’s a lot to be said for secular states, as recent events remind us. Putting the priests and the mullahs in their place and throwing off the yoke of inherited ideology and ignorance has been one of the West’s great achievements.

It is not too fanciful to suggest that much of this is now in danger. The levels of surveillance and security will no doubt be increased, with no guarantee of any greater effect. If social profiling is not already happening, it’s fair to assume that it will and should. It seems difficult to argue that whatever can be done to stop such outrages and threats to social cohesion happening should be done.

But the day-to-day tedium of increased security pales into significance to the longer-term consequences of such acts. Governments flounder in the face of such events, or they do in liberal democracies, at least. Personal and political liberties are the very stuff of Western civilisation and it is precisely those that are under attack. Paradoxically, if they are to be preserved they may have to be suspended.

The very ideas of progress, emancipation and improvement are no longer part of the political discourse. It is hardly surprising. Insecurity and uncertainty are becoming endemic, even if the chances of actually being directly affected by such events remains vanishingly small.

But we are all becoming collateral damage. It is becoming an all-too-familiar, deeply depressing part of our collective lived experience. Yes, I know Paris and Nice still compare favourably with Tehran and Aleppo, but that’s not really the point. We need examples of places where politics and security actually work successfully. On the whole, France has been a pretty good example for many years.

If there is nowhere that life can be lived in a reasonably – yes – civilised manner with some degree of confidence about getting to the end of it without being blown up, then we shall all suffer from the corrosive effects of anxiety, no matter how misplaced it may be relative to actual threats.

It is possible to ignore the presence of troops on the streets, as I learned to do in Paris. But it’s not possible to ignore what their presence means or the fact that it seems to be ineffective. The sort of freedoms that are built on trust and confidence may not be sustainable.

The fact the Donald Trump has seized on the Nice attacks in an attempt to justify his policies is a telling indicator of just how bad things already are. They could become a lot worse if he becomes president.

Mark Beeson is Professor of International Politics, University of Western Australia

Courtesy: The Conversation

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France has again been the scene of a lethal terrorist attack. At least one attacker drove through and then opened fire on crowds of French and foreign citizens enjoying Bastille Day celebrations in Nice, killing at least 80 people and injuring scores more.

Though there is as yet little solid information on who conducted this attack and whether any particular terrorist group can claim responsibility, it has shown what dreadful impact can be caused by the use of an innocuous and familiar part of modern life – a motor vehicle.
 

A long history

Though this attack included the use of firearms and hand grenades, it would seem the great mass of casualties was caused by the deliberate driving of the vehicle at high speed into clusters of people.

Though eventually shot dead, the attacker managed to exact a dreadful toll primarily through use of a vehicle.

The use of vehicles to deliver catastrophic destruction has a long history. Timothy McVeigh’s truck-borne bombing in April 1995 killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in the US. And just a few weeks ago, a truck packed with explosives killed more than 200 and injured hundreds more Iraqi people innocently undertaking their Eid shopping in Baghdad.

All manner of transportation methods have been used as a means of destruction. Vehicles from the motor car to trucks, motorbikes, bicycles and before that even horse-drawn carriages have been used to conduct terrorist attacks against governments and civilians alike in countries as diverse as Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.
 

How can people be protected?

What’s concerning about the Nice attack is that a low-technology pervasive tool of modern society was used as the primary weapon with such dreadful success.

If this attack has been inspired by Islamic State’s exhortations to attack the West with whatever implement is at hand, there are new implications for the security of social spaces.

In 2014, a radicalised individual deliberately drove over two Canadian soldiers. One soldier died. So, do we now have to fear a new “low-tech terrorism”?

We are already aware in modern societies of the risks of irresponsibly driven vehicles. The accidental and deliberate use of vehicles to kill and maim has also been a factor in trying to create secure spaces for pedestrians in malls and kerbside dining venues. In 1983, Douglas Crabbe deliberately drove his 20-tonne truck into a crowded bar in the Northern Territory in Australia, killing five and seriously injuring 16.

In this regard we are all familiar with the installation of bollards and other large immovable devices at the entrances to malls, government buildings and even adjacent al-fresco dining places.

As is the case with any high-tech threats, what’s key is whether those individuals who plot such activities have come to the notice of government security and policing agencies. While such agencies can monitor the plots of those extremists it has knowledge of, it is regrettably entirely possible there are individuals whom the government is not aware of.

The motor vehicle is such an everyday part of our society. And it is possible there are individuals who may be motivated to copy this attack.

Similarly, it is possible there could simply be other individuals who have become thoroughly radicalised who now see this as a low-tech option to plot in their home countries. The Nice attack will have consequences for how those spaces where people enjoy recreation and events are planned.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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