Then and Now

"To all of you, I solemnly promise that France will do everything to destroy the army of fanatics who committed these crimes. It was this harmony that they wanted to break, shatter. It was this joy that they wanted to bury with the blast of their bombs. Well they will not stop it. We will multiply the songs, the concerts, the shows. We will keep going to the stadiums, and especially our beloved national stadium in Saint-Denis. We will participate in sports gatherings great and small. And we will commune in the best of emotions, without being troubled by our differences, our origins, our colours, our convictions, our beliefs, our religions. Because we are a single and unified nation, with the same values."
French President Francois Hollande, 2015
 
French patriotism is on high display, perhaps not quite as exuberantly passionate as it was in January after the deadly Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket attacks by Islamist jihadists, but there nonetheless, as expected at a time when a subdued, shocked but defiant population hang flags in their windows in response to the even deadlier attacks that took place early this month in the 10th, 11th, and 12th arrondissements in Paris.

"Not many people living in France heard the celebrated call to arms of a relatively unknown French general, Charles de Gaulle, transmitted by the BBC on 18 June [1940] -- four days after the fall of Paris. Some eight million of them were still on the roads to the south, though by now the traffic was crawling the other way, back towards their homes in the north. But the BBC had agreed to give the Free French a slot each evening, five minutes of it in French, and after his first appel to the French, de Gaulle spoke to them again, on the 18th, 22nd, 24th, 26th and 28th. With each day that passed, his stern, measured voice gain authority. His message did not vary. It was a crime, he said, for French men and women in occupied France to submit to their occupiers; it was an honour to defy them. One sentence in particular struck a chord with his listeners. 'Somewhere', said de Gaulle, 'must shine and burn the flame of French resistance'.
From: A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead

Strasbourg - Alsace, Karl Roos Platz (Place Kléber in french), 13 October 1941

The flame of French resistance was nowhere to be seen by the cowed French, and there was no one to lead them when in 14 June 1940, Nazi German troops rolled into Paris in their spanking-neat uniforms, the very picture of youth, health and virility, cannons hauled by horses, infantry and troops morally unperturbed by having invaded another country, their countless tanks parading through the streets, hardened by their conquering experience in Poland where their reputation for vicious brutality preceded them.

Parisians were fearful, not knowing what to expect of their new condition of national civilian servitude to a military occupier that had vanquished its own military as the juggernaut overran Europe. They perceived the foreign invaders as polite and civil, discounting what they had heard about them in the news, while in turn the German soldiers were astonished at the meekly accepting atmosphere that prevailed from the French public, silently watching their invasion of the city, and quietly returning to their homes.

The principal target-goal of the Islamist jihadists matches that of fascist Germany; to conquer all lands that their military prowess would see fall to their violently destructive onslaught. The secondary goal was to destroy all vestiges of Jewish life, wherever it existed; in their ancient homeland where Judaism predated the religions that fed off its building precepts to give birth to new versions that disowned their Jewish heritage, and anywhere else that Jews might have settled over the millennia in their vast diaspora.

The eternal outsiders, viewed with suspicion and mistrust, anger and simmering hatred, they were easy targets because within any general population where they co-existed ran a rich vein of anti-Semitism, prepared to join forces with the malign genocidal plans of a fascist ideology committed to barbaric and horrendous acts of human depravity. Just as nature herself turns the gears of cyclical events over time-spans impossible for the human mind to fully grasp, so too does the human mind repeat unendingly the appeal to itself of destruction of the 'other'.

Members of the French police special forces evacuate the hostages after launching the assault at a kosher grocery store in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris, on January 9, 2015. (Photo credit: AFP/ THOMAS SAMSON)