French terror attack should be a wakeup call for a divided Europe arguing about fish

What is a “civilisation”? What is it that binds people and countries together and makes them flourish? And what is it that makes them wither and die?

These questions are not new – they have been explored by historians across cultures and continents for generations, from the great fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun to the vast tomes of Edward Gibbon on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire centuries later.

Gibbon wrote that the Roman Empire, which stretched from North Africa to Northumbria, fell because it succumbed to religious zeal. Today, however, the western European states that emerged from Rome’s ashes look set for ruin because of a lack of faith in anything. They have become post-Christian, post-modern societies in which traditional bonds of social solidarity – religious and secular – have been disbanded and where many seem to be ambivalent about or even actively hostile to their own heritage.

One such heritage in particular, sometimes called the tradition of enlightenment, is a commitment to freedom of expression among citizens. It defends the idea that tolerant, if still passionate, debate in an open public sphere is the best way to preserve social harmony and promote individual liberty; that satire is the cure for coercion; that the free mind and the free conscience are the key to the free society.

Nowhere has this ideal, however imperfect in practice, been more passionately defended than in France. It often finds inspiration from figures such as Voltaire, the epic defender of toleration in an age of censorship, absolute monarchies and a powerful Catholic Church; or perhaps from the Baron d’Holbach’s thunderous refrain:

“Si l’erreur et l’ignorance ont forgé les chaînes des Peuples, si le préjugé les perpétue, la science, la raison, la vérité pourront un jour les briser.”

“If error and ignorance have forged the chains that bind peoples, if prejudice perpetuates them, then knowledge, reason, and truth can one day burst them asunder.”

It was this heritage that was channelled by President Emmanuel Macron as he responded to Friday night’s shocking terrorist attack on the streets of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in north-west Paris. The ideals he defended find themselves under siege across the world.

The victim, Samuel Paty, 47, was a history teacher whose crime was to instruct his class in the noble French tradition of l’ésprit critique. In the class, he is believed to have shown his pupils the satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad from the magazine Charlie Hebdo, for which the cartoonists were killed in 2015, and advised Muslim students that they should leave the room if they would be offended. He was beheaded by his assailant nearby his own school, where the words “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” adorn the entrance.

The French President rose to the occasion in a way that the jaded and uninspiring François Hollande, his predecessor, never could. Speaking in front of the school in a sombre yet defiant tone, an impassioned Macron declared the “Islamist terrorist attack” to be an assault on the values of the Republic itself, with powerful rhetorical flourish:

“He wanted to cut down and destroy the Republic in all its values, (along with) enlightenment (lumières), and the possibility of making our children – wherever they come from, whatever they do or do not believe, whichever religion they practice – free citizens. This battle is ours and it is existential. (…) He wanted to cut down and destroy the Republic. They shall not pass. Violence and the obscurantism that accompanies it will not win. They shall not divide us…We must hold fast together, (as) citizens…to be united, without any distinction between us, because we are first of all and before all else citizens united by the same values, history, and destiny”.

The terrible events in France last night were a reminder about what is really important. Europe in the broadest sense as a family of nations bound by history, culture and purpose is supposed to be united by a commitment to the classical religious and political freedoms. Instead, we are now squandering our efforts arguing about… who gets the fish.

This murder should serve as a wakeup call in Britain and the EU member states, which are currently moving towards the brink in a divisive standoff over the Brexit trade negotiations. Both sides on the negotiating table, from the philosophe-president Macron to the libertine Boris Johnson should see how trivial their policy differences are, put them aside, and focus on building a new partnership. In the age of an assertive, authoritarian China, we cannot afford to make our friends the best of our enemies.

Still, I won’t hold my breath.

There was a meme that circulated about five years ago, after the terrible Charlie Hebdo attacks. It showed a list of “Je suis” statements, recalling the platitude of solidarity, “Je suis Charlie”, pledged to the murdered Parisian satirists.

At the bottom of the list, the meme simply read: “Je suis épuisé” – “I am exhausted”.

This air of exhaustion hangs over western Europe today – it is crushing, deep, oppressive. Rather than drawing strength from our history of free speech, open public spheres and religious toleration, Europe is increasingly destabilised. Society is fracturing under the weight of obsessions about identity; common civic culture is corroded by the influence of social media; reasoned debate is engulfed by the rage of righteousness.

The continent today looks more like a series of islands withdrawing into themselves. To steal a line from the great Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran, it looks like a civilisation divided into parts, where each part considers itself to be a civilisation.