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This, arguably, was France at its finest.
A show of emotion and solidarity unseen since the end of the Second World War took an estimated four million people on to the streets of Paris and provincial cities.
There were black and olive faces in the ranks of demonstrators, not just white ones, and Muslims and Jews as well as Christians and atheists.
“Nous sommes un peuple” - we are one people - was the bold declaration on the front page of Liberation.
This was how the left-leaning newspaper saluted a nation unbowed by a bleak three days in which 17 people were murdered by terrorists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices, a Jewish supermarket and the scene of a Parisian traffic accident.
As echoes of this huge gesture of sympathy and defiance reverberated, it was possible to forget uglier displays of collective sentiment seen immediately before French-Algerian brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, and their French-Senegalese accomplice Amedy Coulibaly, began their rampage.
But the far right of Europe is also on the march. And after the tragic events one nagging question presents itself: will the forces of racist, anti-immigrant opinion quickly reassert themselves, replacing the peaceful, dignified evocation of the high-minded French principles of liberty, equality and fraternity with appeals to darker corners of human nature?
In Germany, a movement called Pediga – the acronym of a title translating as “patriotic people against the Islamisation of the West” – has mustered increasing clout in the eastern city of Dresden.
From a first rally attracting a few hundred last October, it has steadily grown. About 18,000 joined a protest two days before the Charlie Hebdo attack and at least 25,000 at a gathering on Monday night.
Despite an appeal by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for Pediga’s “prejudice, cold and hatred” to be ignored, many Germans share the movement’s distrust of immigrants. The effect is predictable – even Muslims long established in Germany feel uncomfortable.
The far right has also made significant gains in other European countries. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (FN), like the Eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party in Britain, won the highest number of French seats in last year’s European parliament elections.
Ukip has since made inroads into the British parliament, with two candidates elected, and there is likelihood of further progress in this year’s general election.
In other countries, including Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands, other nationalistic, anti-Islam parties have recorded significant gains.
Politicians throw up their hands in horror at the sharp rise in immigrants from Iraq, Syria and the Horn of Africa who survive treacherous crossings of the Mediterranean to head for northern Europe.
For the parties that benefit from a heightened state of public alarm, understandably aggravated by the failures of the traditional governments of left, right and centre, there is a feeling that their time has come.
Allusions to the pre-war rise of national socialism in Germany under Adolf Hitler, with Muslims replacing Jews as the chief target for hatred, remain far-fetched. But there are disturbing signs that even mainstream voters are being drawn to populist responses to social and economic problems.
Recent polls in Germany have found that 13 per cent would be willing to join an anti-Islam march. And nearly one in three people said such protests were justified by what they saw as Islam’s growing influence on everyday life.
Conservative commentators complain that while indigenous couples increasingly limit themselves to one or two children, the birth rate among immigrants is much higher.
In France, the sense of unease felt by those who champion harmonious community relations is amply justified by Ms Le Pen’s electoral progress.
Almost 25 per cent of those who voted in last year’s European elections opted for the FN. Much as the party leadership tries to shrug off the “extreme right” tag, the phrase is volunteered by many of their voters in the media.
This support may well rise as the terrorist killings prompt the French right to rail against actions many are only too ready to blame on immigration from Muslims countries.
If elected today, the FN would embark on a radical programme to end or severely curb immigration – especially from France’s former colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa – deporting foreign criminals, protecting French industry and jobs and planning a withdrawal from the euro currency.
Ms Le Pen also advocates the death penalty and would order a referendum on the issue.
She is already seeking to profit from the notion of victimhood she derives from being “excluded”, as she put it, from Sunday’s rally of national unity in Paris. Instead, she held a small gathering of her own in Beaucaire, a southern town in which the FN is strong.
There was no exclusion, although there was also no formal invitation. The French government made it clear that everyone, FN leaders and members included, was entitled to participate as citizens.
But an important distinction was made by the socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls, when he told RTL radio that unity evoked by the event was intended to be based on “deeply republican values” including tolerance and a refusal to link Islam with extremism. On that basis, the reluctance to offer a formal invitation to the FN was understandable.
As if to undermine his daughter and her relentless campaign of “de-demonisation” of the FN, the party’s founder and honorary president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, flatly refused to identify with the “Je suis Charlie” sentiment of support for the magazine and its slain. The ultranationalist, frequently accused of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and sometimes taken to court for his inflammatory language, has been a frequent butt of Charlie Hebdo satire.
While saying he was “touched by the deaths of 12 French compatriots”, Mr Le Pen, 86, deplored the “anarcho-Trotskyist spirit” of a magazine that had called for his party’s dissolution and was corrosive to “political morality”.
Examples of Islamophobia in the West are not difficult to find. Steven Emerson, a commentator with the conservative US television channel Fox News, described the English Midlands city of Birmingham as one that was totally Muslim where non-Muslims simply do not venture.
He went on to say that in parts of London, “there are Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire”.
The response from Birmingham and a torrent of mocking comments on social media left Mr Emerson looking foolish, prompting him to apologise. In fact, four-fifths of the city’s population is non-Muslim.
But it is not hard to imagine the impact his shoot-from-the-hip appraisal of the city would have on gormless youths attracted by such extremist groups as the English Defence League or British National Party.
As the Kouachi brothers prepared to storm the Charlie Hebdo offices, killing 11 people, before pausing on their escape to dispatch a wounded Muslim policeman, a controversial new novel was provoking fierce debate in France.
By coincidence, Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission (Submission) appeared in the bookshops and was parodied on the front cover of Charlie Hebdo on the day the attack took place.
It describes a France of 2022 in which a split between mainstream parties and fear of the FN have combined to produce a Muslim presidency. In this mythical new society, unemployment and crime rates plummet as women are encouraged to leave their jobs and work is found for men from the banlieues (lawless, immigrant-dominated suburbs).
The old law banning the niqab in public places is abandoned, polygamy is legalised and students are obliged to learn the Quran.
Houellebecq denies he is peddling anti-Muslim fear but can hardly deny he is professionally controversial. He has spoken and written words others would regard as outrageous but dismisses them as belonging to a culture of “apologetic insults” that the French use all the time.
But Laurent Joffrin, Liberation’s editor-in-chief, sees the book in more sinister terms. He says its publication “marks the date in history when the ideas of the far right made a grand return to serious French literature”.
Whatever allowance is made for novelist’s licence, the premise for his work of fiction seems entirely wrong.
Even before the events of this month, most observers of French politics would have said the main threat of an extremist government came not from Islam, which has no organised party, or the radical left, but the FN.
“Mark my words,” says left-wing activist Mounia Benaili, the daughter of Moroccan immigrants, as the debate about Houellebecq’s book gathered steam. “The next president of this country will be Marine Le Pen.”
She says it with a shudder but believes the FN leader will, after the killings in Paris, use them to incite anti-Islam sentiment and claim to represent the disaffected and exasperated of France.
And across Europe, other far-right leaders are intent on exploiting the same concerns.
* This, and my other work for The National, Abu Dhabi, can be seen at http://www.thenational.ae/authors/colin-randall
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