LA FRANCIA E GLI ANTICORPI CONTRO LA BARBARIE

[Autom. eng. transl.] The horrific attack on the Charlie Hebdo editorial office in Paris is the most serious massacre committed on French soil for decades. It is, at the same time, the most perilous challenge to the République after the decolonization process and the red terrorism of the years of lead. Commentators and protagonists of the French political scene have already remarked that from now on there will be a 'before' and an 'after' the massacre that morally marked contemporary French politics and society. For 48 hours the political-media elites have been moving on the difficult ridge between condemning a barbaric and senseless act and appeals for calm and not to lump everything together with the largest Islamic community in the West. A ridge already covered, with a tragic epilogue unfortunately, by the editors and cartoonists of the weekly. Repeatedly subjected to threats and attacks after the publication, in 2006, of the satirical drawings on the Prophet Mohammed, these humorists rose to champions of freedom of expression, and denounced by the highest French Islamic body - the Council of Muslim Worship - in a lawsuit later won by the weekly, they have always been quick not to condemn the Islamic world in order not to fall into the xenophobic trap of the extreme right. This is precisely the challenge facing French political leaders today: to demonstrate that the democratic antibodies of freedom of speech and of the press will be able to win whoever proposes the eternal law of the strongest, be it fundamentalist fanaticism or nationalist ideology. Unfortunately this challenge overwhelms a country in full search of a path for the future. On the one hand, the issue of secularism and the not always easy coexistence of different cultures and religions has long been no longer confined to academic circles, but embodied in the daily life of millions of citizens, in metropolitan and urban areas in particular. In the face of fanaticism, the response of an ideological secularism, of sterile defense of a Republic erroneously considered to be founded 'against religion', in the same words of some of Wednesday's victims, is probably not enough, while freedom of confession is clearly inscribed in the Constitution. On the other hand, the economic crisis is hitting the French social fabric extremely hard, especially the younger generations and the most marginal sections of the population, where the feeling of insecurity is only increasing. And all this in an extremely divided political landscape, starting with the two main forces: for months the Socialist Party has been facing an internal front opposed to the 'liberal' turn of Hollande and the Valls government; the UMP (right) is in the throes of financial scandals and the wars between potential presidential candidates in 2017. The calls for national unity made, after the massacre, by both sides, starting with the Elysée, therefore bode well. An obligatory and perhaps obvious response, of course, and evidently aimed at embarrassing and isolating the common electoral danger of a rapidly growing National Front. However, if these intentions manage to survive the inevitable controversies about how the massacre was possible, and translate not only into public rhetoric against extremism, but into clear and shared political responses, also aimed at reinterpreting the fundamental principle in a modern way of secularism, perhaps the antibodies to barbarism will begin to gain the upper hand.