Carnage in Isere and Tunis

June 26, 2015

     It is hard to convey the sense of dismay French around the hexagon are feeling in the light of the news that the manager of a French gas company located in l'Ile d'Abeau was decapitated this morning.  This is the first time that kind of brutality has occurred on French soil, which has not lacked for deaths due to radical Islam.

     The suspect was en employee of the gas company into whose tanks he drove his car, precipitating an explosion.  The chronology of the attack and the murder have not yet been established, although reporters have already visited the modest apartment complex where he, his wife and his three children lived.

     The children are polite and well-behaved.  The wife seems to have no idea of her husband's possible association with murderous Islam.  The neighbors say the family was quiet; co-workers say the suspect was very much to himself, but polite.  He had been on the radar screen of the French intelligence services, but fell off after 2008.

     Meanwhile, at least thirty-seven foreign tourists (how many French as yet unknown), have been killed while lying in their beach chairs in a resort in Sousse, Tunisia.  The country, which depends on tourism for its livelihood, has seen tourism fall off by 65% since attacks in March.  The latest attack will be the "coup de grace" for the Tunisian economy and a boon to that of the Portuguese.

     "The Portuguese are Judaeo-Christian, the Maghrebins are not", said an elderly friend who spent much of his career in Tunisia.  "On New Year's Eve in Tunis, everyone went to the theatre.  The plays were French --boulevard comedies by Sacha Guitry and Feydeau.  The audience was 85% Tunisian, but they laughed in the same places we did.  The Tunisians were always the nicest of the North African people, the Libyans the worst", my friend went on to say.

      One of their daughters continues to live in Tunis, where she was brought up.  Do her parents worry?  They do.

      People in their eighties remember living in North Africa pleasantly, remember most of the interactions with North Africans fondly.  They now find themselves faced with a new order which leaves them profoundly ill at ease.

     And those French that had the experience of living in North Africa and the Middle East are far more well-disposed to the peoples of North Africa, the Middle and Near East than the average Frenchman.  And even the most hidebound Front National voter knows more about the people of North Africa and the Near and Middle East than most Americans.  Most of these countries were, after all, French colonies, places where French felt at home.  A recent article in Le Figaro reported on an archive of French newspapers and magazines in Alexandria, Egypt, a collection of papers that is a window into a vanished world in a cosmopolitan city.

     The French remember a civilized world in which they held all the cards, for sure, but where someone who integrated into the French way of doing things could succeed.  President Senghor of Senegal was one example: he is venerated alongside Voltaire and others in Le Pantheon in Paris, a signal honor.  Sidney Toledano, the head of Christian Dior corporation, is of Moroccan Jewish extraction.  Alongside them one can find many natives of North Africa who have distinguished themselves in France.

     And those French who came from pieds noirs  families --from French families who settled in North Africa-- are legion.  Although most would think him quintessentially French, Albert Camus had a Spanish mother, a French father and was born in Algeria.  Yves Saint Laurent was born and raised in Oran, Algeria.  Enrico Macias, the singer, is from a Jewish family from Morocco, as is Gad Elmaleh (the partner of Princess Charlotte of Monaco).  Kad Meerad, the popular actor, is French Algerian.

      One estimate gives the number of Muslims in France at 7.5%.  The number of Jews, in contrast, is 3.3%.  What I notice, living here a good part of the year, is that the French are quite open-minded about new settlers, provided they accept French ways.  The Portuguese are the most notable example of this, having started to come to France as low-wage workers in the 1950s.   However, France continues to provide asylum to a variety of immigrant groups, including most recently, Malians and Libyans fleeing civil war in their countries.  The government has set up shelters for these asylum-seekers in out-of-the-way places in the the country, where local concerns about unemployment and the French economy make resistance to government decrees is difficult.  Notwithstanding, these townspeople have accepted their new neighbors, businesses appreciate the new customers, while volunteers teach them French.

     In a word, the French see themselves as open to immigrants, and willing to help.  Which makes today's attacks in Isere and Tunis a test of France's willingness to go on as before, in a spirit of openness.