On October 2, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, delivers a speech to present his strategy for fighting separatism. He clearly targets (and stigmatizes) the Muslim community there (including 52 mentions of the words Islam, Islamism) insofar as it has refused to be assimilated (to cultural majoritarianism). But, this is a Muslim community which, as most social scientists admit, has engaged in an extraordinary process of integration, socially, economically, and to a certain extent politically, despite some cultural, urban and employment forms of discrimination against them.
While he acknowledged such discrimination and rightly cited the importance of training Muslim imams locally in France, he conflated religious extremism, political Islam, and Islam throughout. He, for instance, said, “Islam is a religion which is experiencing a crisis today, all over the world”. After the horrible terrorist act of killing Samuel Paty, a history teacher who showed his students cartoons that ridiculed the prophet Mohamad, Macron defended this as freedom of expression, saying: "We will not give up caricatures and drawings, even if others back away". This indeed marks an entry into State Islamophobia, the phrase coined by Jean-François Bayard.
To understand his speech, one should read Emmanuel Todd’s recent Les Luttes de classes en France au XXIe siècle (2020). Here Todd makes it clear that Macron cannot secure a second mandate with the current erosion of his bourgeois and petit bourgeois social support as well as that of leftist leaning groups, especially in the wake of the Gilets Jaunes movement in France. He must therefore attract the classical electorates of the far-right identarian movement, National Front (especially the working class component). The strategy to fight separatism in these Islamophobic, populist, and arrogant secularist tones is indeed first and foremost an election strategy. In this article, I want to focus on how the populism of Macron conceptualizes freedom of expression and “political Islam” to this end.
