Charlie Hebdo and the Belhoumi family

Abstract

The terrorist attacks of January 2015 in Paris prompted intense public debates concerning the relationship between Muslims and core elements of French republican values such as free speech and laïcité. The voices of Muslims themselves were heard relatively little in French media coverage of these matters. Drawing on a sociological study of eight second-generation members of an Algerian immigrant family, this article shows how their first-hand testimony illustrates the diversity of attitudes among French Muslims. Female members of the family who had built successful careers participated in the huge January 11 rally condemning the terrorist attacks and supporting free speech. Brothers with poorer employment records expressed more cynical attitudes, including in some cases supporting the claim that Charlie Hebdo journalists had been “asking for it” by publishing highly provocative cartoons which many Muslims considered to be Islamophobic. A sister working as an employment counsellor in a disadvantaged multi-ethnic banlieue with high levels of unemployment recounted how the disaffected and in some cases increasingly unhinged attitudes displayed in recent years by those she was charged with helping resembled those of the young men who had perpetrated the jihadist attacks of January 2015.