The tone has changed dramatically. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015, President François Hollande’s main emphasis was on pulling the nation together. After the attacks in Paris on Friday November 13th, the mood has switched to a war footing as the French government seeks to respond to the “act of war” committed by a “terrorist army”, namely Islamic State (IS) which has claimed responsibility for the attacks. As for the notion of national unity, on a political level that already seems under strain.
President Hollande himself highlighted the change of mood on Monday afternoon when he addressed an extraordinary meeting of the French Congress – a joint sitting of Members of Parliament and senators – at Versailles near Paris, the first time he has addressed such a meeting and only the second time that any French president has done so since the Fifth Republic was formed in 1958.
Though on several occasions Hollande made reference to national unity, his language was notably bellicose, declaring at the beginning: “France is at war.” And although the head of state insisted that there was no war of civilisations – because the terrorists “don’t represent a civilisation” - Hollande stated: “We are in a war against jihadist terrorism that threatens the whole world, and not just France.” Later in his speech, which was given an ovation by MPs and senators, Hollande said: “In the face of acts of war on our soil, we must be merciless.”
Among the measures outlined by the president there was a pledge to change the French constitution – articles 16 and 36 – to allow the government to respond more efficiently to such crises in the future, a promise of more air strikes against IS, the creation of 5,000 more police and gendarme posts, plus 2,500 in the justice and prison services, a freeze on defence job cuts until at least 2019, and a request that the United Nations Security Council meets to pass a resolution condemning terrorism. In Europe, France will call for the speedy implementation of “co-ordinated and systematic controls” of the EU’s internal and external borders. And as expected Hollande confirmed he will ask for the state of emergency announced on Friday to be extended for three months.
The president also made it clear that increased spending on security is more of a priority than meeting French spending and budget targets set by the European Union. “The Security Pact wins out over the Stability Pact,” he said. Another planned law change would allow people with dual nationality to be stripped of their French nationality if convicted of a terrorist act, even if they were born French. In addition, the president wants it to be possible to ban dual citizens from returning to France, and to make it easier to expel foreigners who pose a grave threat to public order.
Even before Monday’s speech, however, the French presidency and government had shown it was on a war footing. On Sunday night ten French jets dropped a total of 20 bombs on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in northern Syria. The first target of the operation, carried out in coordination with American forces, was an IS command centre, recruitment centre and weapons depot. The second was, according to the French defence ministry, a terrorist training camp. IS later claimed the sites had been abandoned in advance and that there were no casualties.
The air strikes had been expected after the government’s tough words on Saturday in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. “What happened is, historically, even more unbelievable than the attacks on Charlie. We’re faced with something extraordinary, an historic event,” says a military source. Not just because of the number of people killed but also the way the attacks were carried out. “It’s worst that one thought was possible. The toll is directly related to a method of operation that has been perfected.” says the same defence source. A police source added: “We didn’t imagine that they could resort to suicide bombers ready to kill themselves as in Iraq. And this is no longer about a targeted attack. They attacked young, urban and mixed-race France.”
It is a view shared inside the Elysée Palace. François Hollande’s close aides do not see Friday’s events as a repetition of January but as an escalation, even as attacks of a different nature altogether. “In January the terrorists had grown up in France, a country in which they no longer recognised themselves,” says one close advisor to the president. “This time it’s a terrorist army that is training foreign and French fighters to attack France. And it’s no longer journalists, Jews and the police who they are attacking. It’s all French people.” Another Hollande advisor says: “The response must be different.”
That thinking explains President Hollande’s language and the measures announced during his speech to French Parliamentarians on Monday afternoon. To a hushed chamber at the Palace of Versailles, Hollande - who used the word ’jihadists’ rather than ’Islamists’ to describe the terrorists - said: “We are faced with a terrorist organisation that has taken territory, has financial assets and military capability. The France that the murderers wanted to kill was youth in all its diversity.” But the president insisted that Islamic State could not and would not win. “Terrorism will not destroy the Republic because the Republic will destroy terrorism. Our democracy has triumphed over much more formidable adversaries than these cowardly murderers.”
A presidential source insisted that all the measures to be taken against Islamic State abroad and jihadists in France must and will comply with “the rule of law”, something Hollande repeated several times in his address to the Congress. However the same source continued: “But the choice of terms used since Friday show that we are prepared to go quite far.” Indeed some observers see similarity – in language at least – between the French government’s public utterances and that of the neo-conservatives of the George W. Bush administration in the US, which used similar talk of the “war on terrorism” and which went on to create the status of “unlawful enemy combatants” to justify emergency measures.
Le Figaro newspaper had already reported that the French government wanted to extend the state of emergency, first announced on Friday night, for three months. Security forces had themselves asked that it stay in place until at least the end of the COP 21 climate conference that is being hosted by France from November 30th to December 11th. “We are going to have to ensure the security of more than 140 foreign delegations for the summit on climate change, even though we are at the limits of our capacity in terms of security forces. We need every regulatory measure to be able to respond to this situation of extreme emergency,” says a police source.
And when he met parliamentarians at the Elysée on Sunday, ahead of the speech to Congress, François Hollande had already indicated that he wanted to change the 1955 law on states of emergency, in particularly over their “scope” and “duration”, which is currently limited to 12 days without a parliamentary vote. The continuing intervention in Syria must also be put before the French Parliament: the National Assembly will debate and vote on it on November 25th, according to parliamentary sources.
Hollande himself began to use the expression “act of war” to describe the attacks following Saturday’s special defence council meeting at the Elysée. “It’s an act of war which was committed by a terrorist army, Daesh [editor’s note, the Arabic acronym for Islamic State], against France, against the values that we defend everywhere in the world, against what we are, a free country which speaks to the whole world,” Hollande said then. Hollande’s close ally, defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, also described the shootings and bombings as an “armed attack of historic proportions”. He told JDD newspaper: “Daesh is a genuine terrorist army.”
’ A war requires exceptional measures’
As is often the case, prime minister Manuel Valls has gone even further in his rhetoric than others in the administration. On TF1 television’s evening news bulletin on Saturday he declared: “We are at war ... We will strike this enemy in order to destroy it, in Europe but also in Syria and Iraq. And we will respond on the same level as this attack. With the desire to destroy this terrorist army. And we will win this war.” In warlike terms, Manuel Valls spoke once more about the “enemy within” as well as “outside”. He said: “A war requires exceptional measures. There won’t be a moment of respite for those who attack the Republic. With the methods available under the rule of law, but strong methods. Because we are at war we must expect other attacks. And we will respond.” On Monday morning the prime minister also told RTL radio: “We will act on all fronts to destroy Islamic State.”
A sign of the tough tone adopted by the government came when in his Saturday interview Manuel Valls refused publicly to reject outright the proposal made by Laurent Wauquiez, secretary general of Nicolas Sarkozy’s right-wing Les Républicains party – and also made by the far-right Front National – to detain anyone subject to a so-called ’S’ security file in an internment camp. According to Valls this would involve more than 10,000 people. Instead he simply said: “I’m ready to examine all realistic solutions, that conform with the law and our values, and which above all are effective … I am open to all proposals.” In reality he is opposed to such a measure – the government believes it would be pointless and unworkable – but ministers do not want to leave too much political space free for the Right to operate in. “We mustn’t let them occupy the national terrain,” explains a François Hollande ally.
In that, Monday’s speech was largely a success. Some of these planned changes - notably those affecting dual nationals and a closer relationship with Putin’s Russia - are long-standing demands of the Right and far right in France and were met with a guarded welcome. “François Hollande has announced measures that go in the right direction, but why weren’t they taken after January?” said senior MP Éric Ciotti from Les Républicains. Another senior LR figure Christian Estrosi, who is mayor of Nice, commented: “Measures that go in the right direction.” The Front National MP Marion Maréchal Le Pen was even more fulsome in her praise. “The president is picking up some of our proposals and I am very happy about that,” she said. However, the head of the LR’s parliamentary group at the National Assembly, Christian Jacob, indicated that his members may not vote for the modification of the Constitution, which requires a three-fifths majority of both chambers of Parliament.
In fact the Right had previously undermined appeals for national unity made by François Hollande. The demand by Les Républicains (LR) – formerly the UMP – for a debate to be held after President Hollande’s speech to the Congress at Versailles was an illustration of this. So, too, have been the declarations made by former president and head of LR Nicolas Sarkozy. He has promised to make proposals to “guarantee the security of all our compatriots”. The director general of LR, Frédéric Péchenard, said Sarkozy would bring forward “tough proposals to change our foreign policy, to take courageous decisions at a European level and reinforce our security policy to match the threat.” Already, on the night of the attacks, Sarkozy had declared: “Our foreign policy must take on board the fact that we are at war. Our internal security policy too. We need major changes to fully guarantee our security.” Former prime minister François Fillon and Sarkozy’s one-time rival for the presidency of the LR, Bruno Le Maire, have also made pronouncements along similar lines. Up to Monday only Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux and Sarkozy’s main rival to be the Right’s presidential candidate in 2017, had continued to back the extremely fragile “national unity”.
In the meantime no one, so far, has questioned the emergency measures that have already been announced by the government: the state of emergency, a first since the Algerian War, the re-establishment of border controls and the reinforcement of the role of the army, with 3,000 extra soldiers mobilised on French soil. Even on the Left, virtually no one has spoken up to warn about the risks to democracy involved. “We support the emergency measures decided upon,” said the first secretary of the ruling majority Socialist Party (PS), Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, before Hollande’s speech on Monday. “They call for [yet] more.”
François Hollande and his government are indeed planning to go even further when it comes to air strikes. According to several sources questioned by Mediapart, the last two meetings of the country’s defence council had already discussed stepping up air strikes in Syria. For the first time last week French jets struck an Islamic State-controlled oil site and gas factory. This form of operation could now increase in number. “We must target all of Daesh’s capabilities … there are other centres of this type and we will continue to strike them,” Jean-Yves Le Drian told the JDD.
According to Mediapart’s information, France is said to be examining the carrying out of strikes on logistical targets that serve to finance Islamic State, in particular the ports from which the organisation exports oil from those regions of Iraq under its control. At the G20 summit in Turkey on Sunday a number of different political leaders apparently subscribed in part to French analysis, by expressing their desire to cooperate over attacking the source of terrorist funding. This is something that has been demanded by the French military for some time. In his speech on Monday Hollande pointed out that he would be meeting with US president Barack Obama and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to ensure there is a common approach to destroying Islamic State.
However, the extension of French air strikes against IS poses several problems. These include the effectiveness of the attacks, in the context of a war against terror that has systematically failed since 2001, the French armed forces’ lack of resources at a time when it is already deployed in a number of fields of operation, notably in Africa, the risk of “collateral damage” by killing civilians, and the question of the legality of the French interventions.
In France itself some security measures could be adapted to assist police and security service operations. Even before the attacks legislation on the role of the army in interior operations was already being prepared, and was planned for the beginning of 2016.
Since Saturday there have been calls from senior figures in the security forces and people close to the intelligence services – which have significant influence inside the corridors of power – for a reinforcement of security measures. Even though the new surveillance and intelligence law, which has already been bitterly criticised by many critics for going too far, is in the course of being implemented, some are now saying that in the light of Friday’s attacks too many shackles have been imposed on the way it operates. In particular security service officials want to remove the limits that restrict certain surveillance methods to officers from the intelligence services and the internal security agency the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI), and to extend them to some police and gendarme units too. The push to loosen these restrictions will come at the start of December when the decrees implementing the law are due to be approved by France’s top administrative authority the Conseil d’État.
More discreetly, but just as effectively, there has also been lobbying on behalf of the security services to bring in the private sector to help with security issues, given the current budgetary restraints. Security staff on trains run by the national rail company SNCF and the Paris region transport authority RATP are already armed, and could soon be authorised to search baggage and passengers. The new idea is to allow private armed security forces to maintain security at certain locations, in place of the police. The idea has already been proposed by some police unions and appears to be gaining ground quickly.
LÉNAÏG BREDOUX ET MARTINE ORANGE