A family matter: Charlie Hebdo and French fantasies of collective trauma
Illustration by Gela Zautashvili and Ketevan Peradze
There are pictures and scenes everyone I ever talked to remembers. One of those is certainly the footage of what happened on September 11th 2001, a memory everybody in my generation seems to have. The images I have in my mind are rather blurry as I was only eleven years old when, on my older brothers birthday, my family and I were sitting in the garden, having a barbecue and birthday cake, his Spanish girlfriend called on his huge cell phone – one of those that looked like bricks – and told us what she had seen on TV. We drove home and watched the news, this I remember vividly. What we were seeing in those pictures was an event that set a world-changing process in motion. It was the 21st-century foundation of a widespread worldview that still influences not only our everyday life and our perspective on the United States and worldwide power structures but also global foreign policy. The eleven-year-old me grew up thinking that this was the default script of the world and how political dynamics were supposed to be. Soon enough I understood that this script was written by identifiable authors. I also learned that foreign policy is not a reaction to natural and inevitable facts, but that it is a construction, a question of perspective and interest. The role the media plays in this dynamic always fascinated me, its performative purpose became the centre of my research in contemporary history. As a communication tool, media acts as an intermediary, its output is one of the fundamentals of our worldview that thus influences greatly on political decisions.
I was certainly better equipped to understand what was happening when the attacks in January 2015 took place in Paris than I had been 2001. Not only could I follow the news from different perspectives and hear and read different voices, as technology had evolved since then, but I could also see how a majority of German and French media concentrated on one narrative they conveyed. This mainstream narrative often copied post-9/11 discussions, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo were sometimes described as the “French 9/11” – a very problematic interpretation that implies the two events could have the same consequences. Reading the news after the attacks, I was frightened by that possibility and I felt compelled to analyse how the debates were structured, where the arguments and metaphors historically came from and what it was all about. This time, I wanted to see for myself how the constructivist role of journalism was put into practice and which worldview it conveyed.
Four years after the January 2015 murders, it is still common to ask and be asked among colleagues and acquaintances all over the city: Where were you, when it happened? It is followed by a detailed description of what appears to have become a collective memory among Parisians. Most people start by the moment they were sitting in the office, in university, in public transportation or at home, hearing the news or checking twitter, soon calling their friends and family. They describe how they did not understand what was going on, a feeling of shock, of anger, of fear. The report is finished off with the gathering at Place de la République the same evening, to mourn and to “defende la République.”
What happened was that two armed men penetrated the office of French magazine Charlie Hebdo killing twelve: police officers, a security guard, and journalists during a staff meeting at around 11 a.m. on January 7th, 2015. The two men flee the building and drive out of town, hiding in a printing press in Dammartin-en-Goële until French special forces kill them on January 9th. In the meantime, another man shoots a policewoman in the streets before taking several hostages in a Hypercacher supermarket. The total number of victims adds up to 17 after police put the hostage-taker to death. In a later published video, the murderer Ahmed Coulibaly explains having worked together with the two others and professes an affiliation to so-called Islamic State and Al Qaida in Yemen. The reason for their collaboration, so Coulibaly explains, was for the murders to have a “bigger impact.”
Judging from my last years researching far-reaching and transnational media communication, I can say that the attacks did have a large impact: The mainstream framing of what happened in January 2015 impacted the discourse on the free press, freedom of speech, identity and national representation. That explains why every story I heard from Parisians sounds the same. Immediately after the first information on what was happening emerged on the news, one story was told by almost every public voice and has been internalized ever since. It has become a so-called Flashbulb memory. These memories work like “never fading photographies” of the circumstances people find themselves in while a particularly shocking event happens. Those memories are typically very emotional and detailed while being very subjective and inaccurate at the same time. The persons concerned are nevertheless certain of their memory as it seems real and factual. However, the Flashbulb memory itself can and does change. According to the Narrative Rehearsal Hypothesis, memories are strongly affected by the representation of the event. Its permanent display on media leads to a uniform construction of the memory for every spectator.
Why is this problematic in the case of Charlie? The main message appears to be about free speech, about condemning terrorism and promoting tolerance. One might look at pictures from the march on January 11th and congratulate Europeans for managing to break through the spiral of violence, answering the murders with a sign of unity throughout the world. When German national predominant newspapers admiringly wrote how “even victims and Muslim imams” (sic) marched side by side on Place de la République. These messages of reconciliation would only convince those oblivious of basic communication strategies and French migration history. The march on January 11th produced iconic pictures of François Hollande, arm in arm with Angela Merkel, Mahmoud Abbas, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nicolas Sarkozy, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, Ahmet Davutoglu, Jean-Claude Juncker and many more who joined the cortege under the infamous motto “Je suis Charlie.” Identifying with Charlie, it seemed, did not only mean mourning those who died but meant a commitment to what high circulation print media unanimously called “la République,” “western ideals,” and “European values.” The mainstream framing had an obvious narrative: the target of the attack had been the free press, personified by the dead journalists who, to make matters worse, were long-known, beloved public figures. They had accompanied a whole baby boomer generation of French opinion leaders during their coming-of-age years. The journalists of Le Monde and Le Figaro, the ones whose articles are read nationwide, wrote about the victims as if close friends and idols had died. But who were they speaking for when they wrote: “we are orphans now”? They constructed a virtual collective that had been traumatized by the brutal killings of their father figures. A generation of Parisian journalists painted the picture of grieving for their fathers. The nicknames of the victims “were so familiar” they underlined, they established fictitious ties of parenthood like “Cabu was my second father”. they told personal anecdotes and published portraits of the victims identifying their personal loss with national grief.
The emotional trauma, emphasized by the widespread and frequently rehearsed painstaking depiction of the “barbaric” brutality of the killings, touched the French. Those who identified with Charlie, who joined the march and claimed “Je suis Charlie” took part in the conjured unity of the attacked République and were part of that blood relationship, mourning their fathers. The personal emotional framework of a few journalists became a national projection screen, their perspective became the mainstream frame for dealing with Charlie.
In the days after the attack, I witnessed how this narrative reached its climax on January 11th, when, as French interior ministry claims, at least 3,7 million people all over the country gathered to show solidarity with Charlie. Naturally, not everyone was Charlie – when #jesuisCharlie was invented January 7th by twitter user Joachim Roncin, the complementary #jenesuispasCharlie (I am not Charlie) emerged immediately. Nevertheless, the farthest reaching print media was unanimous about it, they most definitely were Charlie. They spun tall yarns about reconciliation, even seemingly subtle ones sounding like : “Oh, how the journalists would laugh if they knew that even Catholic church is mourning for them.” They underlined how inclusive and broad the Republic’s umbrella could be when they reported how “even” Le Figaro was on Charlies’ side now, albeit their mutual hostility before the attacks. The message was: In La République, we fight and we criticize, but we do not use violence. And when we are under attack, we stick together against the bigger enemy.
Fair enough, it seems, when 17 civilians die in that way, in a place where physical violence in public space is not common, people need to express their feeling of insecurity. It is shocking and threatening to be reminded of the haphazardness of surviving. But creating a narrative to give sense to what happened by calling the dead journalists “martyrs who died in the battle of defending free press” leads to that same problematic dichotomy that keeps the spiral of violence running. Let’s face it: When one gathers with like-minded people to defend La République, you have to know who is on the other side. But who can you put there? Especially if the three killers were born and raised in and around Paris? Finding the difference between yourself and the enemy becomes easier when you attribute characteristics to the different positions. Say the victims occupied a position characterized by “freedom of the press,” implying an affiliation to ideas from Enlightenment period and French Revolution when the idea of a free press entered the stage in article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789 and became a conceptual referential fundament for western societies. That idea is what stood behind the identification with Je suis Charlie, a form of self-assurance and fellowship, expulsing those who do not adhere to the concept and are therefore “less civilized” and “underdeveloped.” Vaunting themselves that free press was a central principle of European societies and thus the victims had not “died in vain,” newspapers all over France continuously tried shaping the mental map that made clear who was in and who was out. First, it was a French subject, but international solidarity forbade to draw the virtual line at national borders.
Extending to other countries, soon enough it became a “European,” “western” or “occidental” affair, a strategy that made it easier to identify who was on the other side. Although the ubiquitous liberal claim “pas d’amalgame” urged readers not to mix Islam and Islamism, it clearly pointed the finger at Muslim citizens. The murders are labeled “Islamist terrorism” and interpreted as a specific form of violence by Muslim fundamentalists aimed at the French society in order to politically take over the country. Michel Houellebecq, a controversial and acclaimed contemporary writer, describes this scenario as an ideological takeover in his novel “Submission” that was published on the day of the attacks. The author was a friend of Charlie Hebdo staff members and his caricature was on the cover of Charlie that same day. The co-occurrence of the two events put the much-anticipated novel and its contents in the public spotlight and underlined the fear of a national infiltration by fundamentalists. “Pas d’amalgame” was an attempt to calm this anxiety. But it already implied specific segregation by declaring over and over who not to hold accountable. Unsurprisingly, the frontline for these metaphors of conflict often ran at religious boundaries. It was Huntington's familiar culture clash, with a small twist: Considering Charlie's yearlong conflict with the Catholic church, one could never identify them being on the same side and therefore not bluntly construct a clash between Christianity and Islam. What happened was that it was replaced with the concept of La République against the enemies of said concept. And the notion “freedom of the press” stood as a representative of the republican ideal. This substitute made it possible to draw a flexible line because it was based on a concept instead of measurable factors like nationality or membership of a church. It allowed the construction of mental maps that could change relative to political perspective.
The trauma of the experience was thus used for creating virtual spaces of social, national and conceptual affiliation that influenced European foreign policy. On a social level, the affiliation was based on identifying with Charlie in terms of trauma – those who did not see their father figure represented by the elderly French journalists did not belong to the group. On the national level, one had to testify for la République – this included those whose fathers weren’t looking and thinking like Charlie, but who still did adhere to French rule of law. This excluded for example the children and teenagers who did not participate in the minute’s silence that was held all over France on January 8th. Those children did not identify Charlie with their fathers, they were mostly the kids who go to the public schools in “priority security zones” and “sensitive areas”. To test the mostly Muslim population of the Parisian suburbs, journalists made an experiment where they “walked around the banlieue for three days with Charlie tucked under their arm” and waited to be confronted, insulted or worse. (Spoiler: Nothing happened, everyone condemned the attacks and was annoyed being asked over and over to position themselves on something so obvious).
If neither applied, the conceptual question of the free press was asked to find out who was in and who was out. It evolved to a question of whether certain groups, countries or beliefs belonged to France and to Europe. In this frame, a “Charlie-test” emerged. This test served as an indicator of “Europeanness” and was used in the context of Euro-Turkish relations. It measured if newspapers and governments were ready to identify with Charlie and how they reacted to the Muhammad caricatures. National repression of the images indicated the failure of the test and thus to a lack of Europeanness, which resulted in political exclusion. When former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met Donald Tusk in Brussels on January 15th to discuss the accession of Turkey to the EU, the President of the European Council specified that in fact, both parties supported the accession but that there were still “differences” to overcome concerning the Charlie cartoons.
This simplification creates a causal connection between the publication of the caricatures and the question of whether Turkey could be part of the EU. The evaluation of the cartoons is linked to political negotiations. The collective trauma and thus different forms of solidarity become factors of tension between countries. Representing Turkey as politically incompatible leans on the idea that free press is a decisive characteristic of Europe and that it is expressed by the position one takes relating to the attacks. However, it becomes a political question as soon as the debate is about a country that is not part of the virtual western map. It ceases to be about a universal principle and borders on policing intimate preferences regarding faith, loyalty and even sense of family. It gets politicized and develops from a symbolic representation of identity to particular requirements and even accusations that manifest in political choices.
When it comes to Turkey, the dynamic changes profoundly after the migratory flux towards Europe linked to the war in Syria, and there is neither talk of Charlie nor Turkish accession. While the EU-Turkey Statement concerning migration is negotiated by Merkel, concerns about the free press in Turkey take a back seat, and a prospect of a faster approach between Turkey and the EU is put forward. Until then, the mainstream framing of a simple confrontation summarized under the “Charlie test” remains valid and is applied to several countries. Since it is a flexible line of demarcation that is at the same time strongly emotionally charged, it can be applied and withdrawn in a large variety of contexts, depending on political expediency. From that point of view, no difference has to be made between Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; they all represent the “other party” because they all fail the Charlie-test. In this way, the handling of the attacks serves as a flash-test to identify who one is defending La République from – ostensibly blind to the fact that French-born men executed the attacks. This did not only affect French and European foreign policy but was a very visible token in French everyday life. From the rebellious children during the minute’s silence to questionable experiments in Parisian suburbs, adherence to Charlie became an indicator of belonging to the mainstream society.
By blending incomparable units like nationality and ideology, western media not only enormously simplifies the virtual conflictual parties but generalizes protagonists to reduce complexity and define the in- and out-group. It is a matter of linguistic strategies, constructing a hierarchic structure of groups and much less a sign of unity and tolerance. It is what became evident when I examined how French and German newspapers represented the constructed spaces via the mainstream framing of Charlie Hebdo attacks by communication strategies that are based on traditional power imbalances. Journalists fell back on established boilerplate codes that suggest simple, discriminatory worldviews and that – rather than conveying humanism – take the same line as imperialist representations all along and that is part of a linguistic power exercise.