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James McAuley
Correspondent abroad on French and European politics and culture
March 15 at 12:34
PARIS – Before embarking Friday for a deadly shootout targeting Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand, the alleged gunman – a 28-year-old man claiming to be an "ordinary white man of the family" – issued a 74-page manifesto on Twitter.
This annoying and annoying text highlights the motivation of an attack that killed 49 Muslims during Friday prayers and injured dozens of others. Among other things, this suspect – allegedly accused of murder by the Christchurch police after the Christchurch police – wrote that a trip to France in 2017 had convinced him that the country was "invaded" by "non-whites".
"The last push witnessed the state of French cities. It has been many years since I heard and read about the invasion of France by non-whites, many of those rumors and stories that I thought were exaggerations, created to promote political speech, "wrote the suspect.
"But once I arrived in France, I found that the stories were not only true, but deeply underestimated," he continued. One significant detail is that the suspect has titled his manifesto "The Great Replacement", a clear reference to the title of a 2012 book by French right-wing polemicist Renaud Camus.
In this book, Camus exposes the "theory" that the white majority of Europe is being replaced by non-white immigrants from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom are Muslims.
The "great substitute" was a war cry of the French far right, even after the sharp drop in arrivals of immigrants to Europe after their heyday of 2015. According to Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of the denialist of the Holocaust, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his darling. from the American far right, the idea fits perfectly with reality.
"Today, some parts of the territory of the so-called French are being replaced by a new immigrant population," she said in 2015.
The notion of "mbad immigration", which will inevitably provoke violent cultural shock, has spread from the margins of French public discourse into the mainstream of politics. Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the French conservative party, Les Républicains, also described Camus's idea of "reality" in 2017.
He also crossed the oceans. In August 2017, in Charlottesville, protesters chanted: "The Jews will not replace us!" (In 2018, Camus published another book, entitled "You Will not Replace the United States!").
In Pittsburgh last October, the gunman who killed 11 Jews in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history was apparently motivated by outrage over immigration and more HIAS, at the origin of the Hbrew Immigrant Aid Society, which provides humanitarian aid to refugees.
[49 killed in terrorist attack at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand]
Came on the phone Friday morning at his home in southwestern France, Camus, who is now 72, told the Washington Post that he condemned the violence of the Christchurch attacks and that he had always condemned similar violence. But when asked if he objected to how his idea of "big replacement" had been interpreted by the general public, including right-wing politicians and their supporters, he replied in the negative.
"That people take into account the ethnic substitution in my country?" He asked. "No, it's the opposite."
Camus added that he still hoped that the desire for a "counter-revolution" against "colonization in Europe today" would grow, a reference to the increase in non-white populations .
"I hope it will get stronger," he said, claiming that this apparent "demographic colonization" was "20 times more important than the colonization that Europe has done in the past." Africa, for example ".
French Muslims, on the other hand, deplore the extent to which these ideas are, in a way, tolerated in polite society in France.
"On one side, Renaud Camus is presented as an extreme right-wing extremist ideologue, but he is also invited on France Culture," said Ybader Louati, organizer of the Paris-based Muslim community. "We gave him a platform."
France Culture is one of the hottest radio programs in Europe, a French equivalent of NPR. Camus also spoke of the "big replacement" of "Replicas", a program run by Alain Finkielkraut, a leading French intellectual.
"I'm just sorry that we continue to pretend that all this is a surprise," said Louati, "while in fact it has become standardized."
The concern over the "great successor" has even reached the relatively remote place of Christchurch, located nearly 20,000 km from the country where the idea was born.
"While I was sitting in the parking lot, in my rental car, I watched a flood of invaders walk through the gates of the mall," wrote the accused shooter in his manifesto, describing a stopover in an average town. from the east of France. "For every Frenchman, man or woman, the number of invaders was doubled. I saw enough and, angry, I drove out of the city, refusing to stay longer in this cursed place and heading to the nearby city. "
"WHY SOMEONE DOES SOMETHING?", Wrote the suspect later in the manifesto. "Why do not I do something?"
Read more:
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