First, a public announcement: thank you all for rec'ing, tipping, and liking the preceding diary. And my deepest apologies to all for never having taken the time to understand how Daily Kos worked (to give you an idea of my cluelessness, I discovered the meaning of the term "tip jar" this evening, and still have to research "shout-out").
Second, since I started, I may as well give a follow up on what happened today. Here is a quick report, below the fold.
My original plan was to dig some more into current controversies around Charlie -but that got sidelined when we started to argue this morning over whether to go at all to the big so-called "Republican March" this afternoon, "we" being a buch of high-school teachers, with a smattering of University faculty. At this point many extreme-left organizations had announced that they would not take part as such in the march, which was organized by the French government. So did the extreme-right. Luz, one of the surviving cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, declared that "the symbols used today are everything against which Charlie always fought".
Our problem was that a lot of us (me included) were very uneasy with some of the stated goals of the march, like "defending Republican values", "upholding national unity", or "opposing terrorism". Most of us don't believe that the "Nation" is a particularly useful framework in which to think politics. Many of us have come to consider "Republican values" as shorthand for "exclusionary policies". And "terrorism" is now used for any act of violence by somebody vaguely seen as either "Arab" or "Muslim" -the two being usually confused, in France at least. The current "wave of terror" is made up of a mass political assassination, an attack on the police, and an antisemitic massacre; labelling all three "terrorism" is merely confusing.
The situation became even worse when we learned of the invitation of leaders which cannot in any way be considered friends of either the Left or freedom of the press: David Cameron? Ali-Omar Bongo? Serguei Lavrov? Benyamin Netanyahu? Really?
Long story short: we went. But we decided not to march along the main, "official" route on boulevard Voltaire, or along the authorized secondary itinerary to the North. Instead, we followed a moving crowd well to the South of Place de la République, the starting point of the demonstration, and took rue Saint-Antoine, an unauthorized itinerary, which I am glad we chose. The crowd was both more working and lower-middle class and more diverse than in most other demonstrations I have been to. There were a few signs, mostly "I am Charlie", and virtually no flags, French or otherwise. There were no slogans, only muted conversation. We marched fast, even though the crowd was fairly thick, and made it to Nation in something like an hour. We came back along the main itinerary: signs and French flags were more numerous, the crowd was significantly more middle-class, and much bigger and more compact, moving extremely slowly.
The complete lack of slogan, and very limited use of signs, was remarkable everywhere. I understood it as a collective and forceful affirmation that the demonstration was indeed not against terrorism, nor for France, nor for Republican values, nor even simply for freedom of expression. This will probably not be the message broadcast in the media -but pictures do show a mostly sloganless, signless demonstration, even in the main cortege, more upscale and maybe more interested in "Republican values" and "national unity".
I am not certain to be right, but here is my interpretation: what the crowd seemed to me to state was that political murder is not acceptable. We "were Charlie", as we would be any other group of people or institution belonging to the French political field, against which mass violence would be unleashed. What Charlie Hebdo contained was utterly irrelevant, and unknown to most demonstrators.
There is no place for murder in French politics. It's a simple statement, but I believe it's a useful one. Going to the demonstration was the right choice, it turned out.