# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
L'assaillant qui a tué un homme est un Français né en Tchétchénie en 1997. Il appartient à "un communautarisme radicalisé en France", a expliqué à franceinfo Charles Pellegrini, consultant en analyse de risques.

L'attaque au couteau a fait un mort, dans le deuxième arrondissement de Paris, samedi 12 mai. (GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)

" Peu importe la nationalité du terroriste, le problème c'est qu'il a rejoint un courant religieux radical qui s'oppose aux valeurs occidentales", a estimé Charles Pellegrini, dimanche 13 mai sur franceinfo. L'ancien chef de l'Office central de la répression du banditisme, et consultant en analyse de risques, a réagi au lendemain de l'attaque au couteau à Paris, qui a fait un mort et quatre blessés.

L'attaque a été revendiquée par Daech. L'assaillant a été identifié : il s'agit d'un homme né en Tchétchénie en 1997 et naturalisé français. " Il y a un communautarisme radicalisé en France. Qu'on soit Tchétchène ou d'ailleurs, l'important c'est d'appartenir à cette communauté", a poursuivi Charles Pellegrini, pour qui, " avec toutes les précautions d'usage, il n'y a pas de filière tchétchène. C'est un hasard ou un concours de circonstances qui a fait que c'est un Tchétchène qui a commis cet attentat".

Le nombre d'adeptes du salafisme augmente et c'est un sas théologique d'entrée dans le jihadisme. Le renforcement de ce communautarisme basé exclusivement sur des valeurs religieuses peut accentuer la menace Charles Pellegrini franceinfo

Une menace forte et durable en France

" La menace existe, elle est là pour longtemps", avertit Charles Pellegrini. Il explique que le jihadisme s'attaque aux " cibles molles : les rassemblements de foule, les établissements de nuit, les gares, les supermarchés. Il y en a tellement qu'on ne pourra jamais anticiper une attaque sur une cible désignée, tout le travail doit se faire en amont", indique-t-il. Mais " il est difficile au quotidien de faire passer cette réalité dans la population".

Si la France " est mieux préparée et lutte mieux" contre le terrorisme, Charles Pellegrini s'inquiète du suivi des détenus revenus de Syrie.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Attaque au couteau à Paris : "Pas de filière tchétchène" mais "un courant religieux radical qui s'oppose aux valeurs occidentales"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
L'assaillant qui a tué un homme est un Français né en Tchétchénie en 1997. Il appartient à "un communautarisme radicalisé en France", a expliqué à franceinfo Charles Pellegrini, consultant en analyse de risques. " Peu importe la nationalité du terroriste, le problème c'est qu'il a rejoint un courant religieux radical qui s'oppose aux valeurs occidentales", a estimé Charles Pellegrini, dimanche 13 mai sur franceinfo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
POLITIQUE - "Nous sommes en guerre". Valls, Hollande, Sarkozy ou encore ce lundi 14 mai Virginie Calmels... de très nombreuses personnalités politiques ont recours à l'utilisation du mot "guerre" au lendemain d'attentats sur le territoire français.

Son emploi est loin d'être anodin et il y a plusieurs raisons à cela, comme vous pouvez le voir dans la vidéo ci-dessus.

Selon Harold Hauzy, ancien directeur de la communication de Manuel Valls et fondateur du cabinet de conseil Objet H, il est du devoir d'un politique d'utiliser le mot "guerre" sans ambiguïté. "Il s'agit de montrer aux Français qu'il y a tout un changement en matière de culture de sécurité qu'il faudra apprendre à mettre en oeuvre".

Tous les politiques n'utilisent cependant pas le terme de la même manière. Ainsi, l'ancien directeur de la communication de Manuel Valls pointe du doigt l'usage du mot "guerre" chez Laurent Wauquiez, pour "se payer le gouvernement", ou encore celui de Marine Le Pen qui souhaite "stigmatiser une communauté".

Si l'usage de ce terme a pour but de mettre un mot sur la situation en France, il permet aussi de faire prendre conscience aux Français que le pays fait face à un nouveau type de conflit.

"En utilisant le mot guerre, les politiques veulent aujourd'hui qu'il y ait une conscience très forte chez les citoyens de ce qu'est le terrorisme", explique la présidente de l'agence de conseil Compass Label, Agathe Cagé au HuffPost. Cette prise de conscience a un but principal pour Cécile Delozier, coach en communication politique, permettre "d'envisager des solutions exceptionnelles qui ne seraient pas acceptables par l'opinion publique en temps normal":
À voir également sur Le HuffPost:
Lire aussi :
* Collomb répond à Mélenchon: "Croyez-moi, il était suivi par la DGSI pour le protéger"

* Le petit mot employé par Gérard Collomb n'a pas manqué de faire sourire

* François Fillon avait réclamé l'arrêt de sa campagne après l'attentat des Champs-Élysées

* Pour suivre les dernières actualités en direct sur Le HuffPost, cliquez ici

* Tous les matins, recevez gratuitement la newsletter du HuffPost

* Retrouvez-nous sur notre page Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pourquoi les politiques nous rappellent toujours que l'on est en "guerre" après un attentat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
POLITIQUE - "Nous sommes en guerre". Valls, Hollande, Sarkozy ou encore ce lundi 14 mai Virginie Calmels... de très nombreuses personnalités politiques ont recours à l'utilisation du mot "guerre" au lendemain d'attentats sur le territoire français. Son emploi est loin d'être anodin et il y a plusieurs raisons à cela, comme vous pouvez le voir dans la vidéo ci-dessus .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For immigrants, this past week has been a doozy: First, the United States Citizen and Immigration Services took the words "nation of immigrants" out of its mission statement. Then, the Supreme Court ruled that immigrants held in detention are not entitled to bail hearings. The Court also declined to to take up a case that deals with the DACA program, sending it back to the Ninth Circuit.

All this came after weeks of debate about who's allowed to come to, and stay in, the country, as Congress tries to draft a new immigration bill. Among the proposals on the table is the 50-year-old provision that allows family members to sponsor relatives.

This week on the podcast we explored how one family is handling the stress of decisions and policies like these while facing a mix of immigration-related challenges. In the Gonzalez family, some members are covered by DACA, some aren't, and one child is a U.S. citizen. You can listen to their story here.

But we also wanted to know more about the bigger picture of where immigrants fit into this nation and how that might be changing.

And so we reached out to an expert who can identify with the Gonzalezes and millions of people like them. Hiroshi Motomura is an expert on refugee and immigration law, and teaches at UCLA Law School. But the subject isn't merely academic for him. He comes from a mixed-status family himself, and has spent decades researching, and living, the shifting fortunes of immigrants and their families.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What did growing up in a mixed status family look like for you?
My father was born in San Francisco, but he grew up in Japan. So he was a U.S. citizen by birth. My mother was born in Japan, so she has Japanese citizenship by birth. I was born in Japan. My family brought me to this country when I was 3 years old under a loophole, at a time when the laws were expressly, explicitly racially discriminatory.

My brother is six years younger than me, and he was born in the United States, so he had citizenship. So in my own family, my father's a U.S. citizen but really felt Japanese, my mother was a Japanese citizen who felt Japanese, I grew up in this country feeling very American but finding out as a young teenager that I had no citizenship at all.

I'll never forget the time my mother and brother and I went to visit relatives in Japan [when I was a young teen.] I had to travel on a document that can be given to refugees. I was a stateless person living in the United States.

So it's a lot of details, but I think it shows that in one family, we often have a people separated into different legal statuses by the accident of their birth. And yet functionally, in terms of how they relate to American society, even living in the same household, they're either identical, or separated only by generations.
Supporters of immigrants' rights have criticized President Trump for saying he wants to limit family-based immigration. These critics have compared his policy proposals with parts of the Immigration Act of 1924 How important is family-based immigration for the people who come to this country? , which had a national origins quota, or the There are a lot of misconceptions about U.S. citizens sponsoring family members. Can you help explain the process? Chinese Exclusion Act. Is that a fair assessment?
There's a couple ways to think about the legislative proposals coming out of the White House. We've had a system for many years that has put a high value on family unity. So the proposals would seriously cut back on that.

What does that actually mean? Since 1965, we have family-based immigration playing a central role, as it always has, but a central role in a non-discriminatory system - at least as far as the legal categories are concerned. That's meant that we've really diversified who can come to this country.
Historically, how has the United States treated immigrants?
So now, the administration is trying to cut that back. One way to think about that is to look at the consequences: This would really make it hard to immigrate from Latin America. You'd have cutbacks in immigration from Latin America, you'd have cutbacks from Asia. The proposals to cut back on the diversity lottery would cut off a significant amount of immigration from Africa. So at one level it looks like it's very neutral. But the fact is, in historical terms, it's really a rollback to the period from the 1920s until 1965.

It's really been a consistent strand in American immigration history that families are the vehicle for integrating Americans into American society, and helping immigrants be productive members of American society. It's not enough to come to this country with a diploma. It's not enough to come with a particular skill set. You have to have people help you become part of American society. And many of the "immigrant success stories" we have are people who came with relatively few resources, or not necessarily stereotypically high education levels, but [succeeded] because there was a family standing behind them.

In many mixed families, you have a younger child who is a U.S. citizen. And the rules say that when that citizen child turns 21, then the citizen child can sponsor or petition for their parents. But it's not as straightforward as all that. It's true that when the parents have the child turn 21, the child can file paperwork and the parents qualify to get into a category that allows them to get legal status. But there are a couple complications. One is that the sponsor needs to guarantee the financial support of himself and the parents.
How do you feel about USCIS taking the line "nation of immigrants" out of its mission statement?
The other thing is that just because you get into a line, it doesn't mean you can get legal status. The system is actually incredibly complicated, and there's talk about, Why don't you stand in line? And yet, we have situations where even people who qualify for a status find the going very difficult.

Looking at the system as a whole, we have an emphasis on employment-based immigration that pretty much requires that you have a college degree. And yet the economy seems to have a very great need for people who don't have a college degree, though many of them are actually very highly-skilled. And one of the reasons that in many of these families, the parents come without legal status is because the system has been set up in such a way that we, for several generations now, have tolerated, and even acquiesced, and to some extent invited people to come outside the law. Occasionally it becomes politically expedient to enforce the law harshly, and we express some shock that people are in the country working illegally.

And yet, that's the way the system has run for at least 50 years, and to some extent the last hundred years. Especially regarding workers from Latin America who have been essential to many industries, but for whom there's no actual line to stand in.

I think the arc of American history has been one of generosity toward immigrants, punctuated with periods of retrogression, downright repression. That's been the flow.

And we see this actually in the fact that the people who are kind of being hard-line against immigration now are often the very people who would've been discriminated against in an earlier age.

So one can look at this as hypocrisy, or irony, but the fact of the matter is, it's also a sign that this country moves forward. And the people we discriminated against in an earlier generation, my God, they've become so American that they can actually discriminate against others.

Well, I think it's very troubling. The reality is, the United States is, and will continue to be, a nation of immigrants. I'm really focusing not on the possibility that one administration or one agency can change the nature of this country or the character of this country. But I'm focusing on what that means. And I think that it really means that the government is not really taking seriously the types of contributions that immigrants have made to this country. And I think the government is really adopting the posture of, You can only come to this country if you're going to jump through a lot of hoops. You're going to pay a lot of money. And it's going to be based on what you can do for us now. As in tomorrow. Or even today.

But I think many of the contributions that immigrants have made to this country have not been very obvious on Day 1. This is the many stories we have of people who came to this country either penniless or at least under modest circumstances, and really contributed and created jobs and created entire industries. And I think a lot of what I see in the removal of "nation of immigrants" is, are we not understanding the history of this country? We're being extremely short-sighted about what has made this country great.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Does It Mean To Be A 'Nation Of Immigrants'?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For immigrants, this past week has been a doozy: First, the United States Citizen and Immigration Services took the words "nation of immigrants" out of its mission statement. Then, the Supreme Court ruled that immigrants held in detention are not entitled to bail hearings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
21 years after scrapping it. Learn more: http://wef.ch/2EwpKgt

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Post by worldeconomicforum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Dans un texte publié sur le réseau social, l'ancienne ministre de la Justice s'adresse à la jeune femme, écartée de l'émission de TF1 après une polémique sur d'anciens tweets.

L'ancienne ministre de la Justice, Christiane Taubira, le 6 juin 2017 à Nancy (Meurthe-et-Moselle). (MAXPPP)

"Cette histoire ne donne guère envie de plaisanter." Dans un texte mis en ligne jeudi 22 février sur Facebook, Christiane Taubira apporte son soutien à Mennel Ibtissem, la candidate de l'émission "The Voice" écartée après la découverte d'anciens messages complotistes sur les attentats de Nice et Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.

Après avoir salué l'interprétation d' Hallelujah par la jeune femme, l'ancienne ministre de la Justice s'attaque à la polémique, qualifiée d'"hystérie". "On vous reproche votre 'turban', disent-ils. Il vous sied délicieusement, sans rien dissimuler de votre beauté encore en éclosion. Ils vous reprochent de chanter en arabe... incultes, ils ne savent pas finir la phrase : en arabe la chanson d'un Juif magnifique. Quelle somptueuse audace, et quelle promesse pour notre monde !" écrit-elle.

"Vous vous êtes excusée, vous avez bien fait"

"On vous reproche des tweets passés. Vos références intellectuelles étaient loin d'être recommandables", reconnaît Christiane Taubira, tout en estimant que le sujet au cœur de cette affaire est d'abord "la fascination" exercée par ces références sur "de jeunes esprits, même brillants". Mais "vous vous êtes excusée et vous avez bien fait. N'en ayez surtout aucun regret, c'est votre hauteur".

Christiane Taubira s'en prend ensuite aux "pleutres à pseudonymes, aux doigts fébriles sur leurs claviers", avant d'adresser un message à Mennel.

La France reste une terre de passion et de générosité. (...) C'est votre pays. Ne vous le faites pas voler. Christiane Taubira sur Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
"The Voice" : Christiane Taubira prend la défense de la chanteuse Mennel sur Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dans un texte publié sur le réseau social, l'ancienne ministre de la Justice s'adresse à la jeune femme, écartée de l'émission de TF1 après une polémique sur d'anciens tweets. "Cette histoire ne donne guère envie de plaisanter."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ENQUÊTE - Alors que la vitesse sur les routes devrait être bientôt limitée sans justification convaincante, la liste des usages prohibés ou fortement déconseillés s'allonge chaque jour. Tandis que, sur les réseaux sociaux, les gardiens de la pensée dominante traquent les opinions divergentes et attaquent en meute ceux qui les professent. La liberté serait-elle si dangereuse ?

Le gouvernement a tenu bon, malgré les manifestations et les opérations escargot encore organisées le week-end dernier: à partir du 1er juillet, la vitesse sera limitée à 80 km/h sur les routes secondaires à double sens sans séparateur central. L'annonce du Premier ministre, en début d'année, a suscité un vaste mouvement de colère dans la population, relayé par les élus des zones concernées. Selon un sondage Harris Interactive, 59 % des Français y seraient opposés (et 67 % des 41 % favorables n'ont pas de voiture...).

Les motards et les automobilistes, déjà pénalisés par la raréfaction et l'envolée du prix des places de stationnement (et des amendes consécutives), s'insurgent contre cette mesure qui fait grincer des dents car elle ne s'appuie sur aucune étude rigoureuse. Elle sauverait jusqu'à 400 vies par an, selon le gouvernement. Pourtant, l'expérimentation lancée voici deux ans par Bernard Cazeneuve consistant à limiter certaines portions à 80 km/h n'a jamais produit le moindre bilan. Par quel tour de passe-passe la direction de la Sécurité routière a-t-elle sorti ces chiffres de son chapeau?

" LIRE AUSSI - Protecteur ou percepteur: la schizophrénie de l'État face au tabac

" LIRE AUSSI - Nouvelles technologies: la peur des ondes

" LIRE AUSSI - Vaccins: l'obligation qui passe mal

" LIRE AUSSI - Robin Rivaton: "Les diktats des minorités l'emportent sur la démocratie"

Auditionné par le Sénat le 24 janvier, Emmanuel Barbe, le délégué interministériel à la sécurité routière, a reconnu, embarrassé, qu'en matière d'accidentologie, une étude sur deux n'avait pas de pertinence. Et que, concernant celle-ci, il y avait un effet statistique qui n'était pas crédible. Nous n'en saurons pas plus! Sur internet, les usagers de la route enragent, arguant qu'il serait plus judicieux d'investir dans la réfection du réseau (signalisation déficiente, lignes blanches effacées, nids-de-poule...) ou d'appliquer intelligemment ces limitations aux zones dangereuses.

En Suisse, où la vitesse maximale autorisée hors localité est passée de 90 km/h à 80 km/h dès 1984, le bilan est mitigé. L'Office fédéral des routes (Ofrou) a noté une baisse significative des accidents mortels à partir de 1992, mais il attribue principalement ce phénomène à la réduction du nombre de kilomètres parcourus. Quant au Danemark, après avoir succombé aux sirènes des 80 km/h sur les routes secondaires, il a rétabli les limitations antérieures dès 2012. Les progrès réalisés sur les véhicules ces dernières années (airbags, ABS, freinage automatique d'urgence, ESP, carrosseries déformables) contribuent certainement plus à la sécurité que la baisse de vitesse. Par un biais ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Drague, alcool, vitesse, sucre, tabac... Ces libertés qu'on nous enlève

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ENQUÊTE - Alors que la vitesse sur les routes devrait être bientôt limitée sans justification convaincante, la liste des usages prohibés ou fortement déconseillés s'allonge chaque jour. Tandis que, sur les réseaux sociaux, les gardiens de la pensée dominante traquent les opinions...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The French Are Making a Mistake About the Charlie Hebdo Tragedy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
They're focusing on free speech and the separation of church and state when they should be thinking hard about the alienation of Muslims living in France.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
France is a country, he said, of "enlightenment fundamentalists" demanding "the imposition of a whole identity."

It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was criticized for describing the situation in ghettos like Clichy as "territorial, social, ethnic apartheid." But in the 10 years since rioting against the police and the state started here, and then spread nationwide, prompting promises of reform, life has worsened: more crime, more unemployment, more poverty, more alienation and now, more radicalization among Muslim youth.

The young people here scoff at the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, calling them "du pipeau," or hot air. They do not feel equal or fully free, and they have little sense of national solidarity.

As M'hammed Henniche, the head of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, which encompasses Clichy, said, "France is the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that's all it is, a declaration." Muslims, he said, feel freer to pray, eat, dress and live as they please in Britain, a monarchy, than in the French Republic.

As in other banlieues, as the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs are known, many young people here refused to comply with a state-mandated minute of silence for the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, whom they regard as having offended Islam.

A 14-year-old who would give his name only as Louins said angrily: "They don't respect us, and then during a minute of silence we're supposed to honor them? How can someone render homage to someone who doesn't respect us? We can't." He told his professor: "I'm going to make a minute of silence for Palestine." His friend Burak agreed, then added: "Stop the hypocrisy."

Mr. Valls and President François Hollande have announced new civics lessons in the public schools to reinforce republican values, including "laïcité," which translates roughly as secularism.

But if you are a Franco-Algerian stuck in the banlieues, Mr. Hussey said, with a fractured identity that is neither French nor Algerian, and you speak a bit of Arabic but not much, Islam can become "the only part of your identity that seems real."

He added, "It's great to feel you're a soldier in this larger battle, and what you're fighting is the big republic that imposes all these things on you" - unemployment, non-halal school menus, a ban on the full veil and minarets, a paucity of mosques and a pervasive sense of being "écarté," or rejected.

Mariam Cissé is deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois. Ten years ago, a cousin, Bouna Traoré, then 15, was one of the teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from the police in a power substation, and whose deaths set off three weeks of rioting nationwide, with more than 9,000 cars burned, nearly 3,000 arrests and 56 police officers wounded.

Since the riots, "there are some new buildings and parks," said Ms. Cissé, 29. "But after that, what? What?"

The unemployment rate is 40 percent in Clichy, one of the poorest towns in France, with half the population under 25; there is a housing shortage, and there was no unemployment office here until last year, she said. It is only about 10 miles from central Paris, but there is no major road and still no mass transit station, despite a decade of promises.

"In no other developed country one sees towns so close but at the same time so far away," she said. "One can't continue to be 15 kilometers from Paris as the bird flies and yet need at least an hour and a half to reach the capital."

The separation and alienation of youth is inevitable, she suggested. Some French lawmakers said, "These youngsters no longer deserve to be French because they no longer adopt the values of the republic," she said.

"But France must assume its cosmopolitanism," she continued. "One can't welcome all sorts of people in the country without accepting their differences."

Gilles Kepel is the great political scientist of the banlieues, having written three books about them, most recently "Passion Française - The Voice of the Ghettos," as well as a report for the government. For him, the target of Islamic radicals is not France, per se, but Europe and its growing Muslim minorities. France, with the largest number of Muslims in Europe and the largest number of those traveling to Syria and Iraq for jihad, is an obvious focus.

But the effort to radicalize "nonetheless builds on things that are French," Mr. Kepel said. Not just poverty and exclusion, he said, but the offense taken "even by Muslims who drink wine" over the cartoons of Muhammed, and then the French Republic's full support for the cartoonists. As important, he said, is the unhealed wound of the French-Algerian war of independence and then of the Algerian war against Islamists.

Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist, said that the country needed a new clarity about its values. "We need a new enlightenment, to reinvent the republic," he said, to better "correspond to the diversity of France."

The fundamental question is "to accept and practice the values of the republic," Mr. Moïsi said. "But what does that mean? Respect for the other, giving reality to liberty, equality, fraternity. Freedom yes, but within limits. Equality, yes, but with limits to inequality in France. And fraternity is really missing."

Ms. Cissé, the deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, put the problem simply: "France has trouble changing," she said.

"Integration, immigration - these are taboo, and at the heart of the program of the National Front and the republican right. Now they must become national issues," she said. "We have to confront these so-called problems so that one can travel as one wishes, practice our religion when and as we want, just like the others. And have a job, truly, because work is important."

Otherwise, she said, "France will be engulfed, in the years to come, in these same problems of 2005 and 2015."

Correction: February 9, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
France's Ideals, Forged in Revolution, Face a Modern Test

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
France is a country, he said, of "enlightenment fundamentalists" demanding "the imposition of a whole identity." It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In St.-Raphaël, the rain started coming down in earnest as the crowd crammed into the small, windowless office. Rachline squeezed his way through, clutching forearms and giving one supporter after another a double kiss. The smell of cigarette smoke and wet wool filled the air; the office, hot, packed and bright, seemed just barely able to contain the ambition and emotion and pride of the moment. "David Rachline is the sixth-most-important person in the National Front," Rachline's chief aide, Julien Jouniaux, a former prison guard, told me earlier in the day.

Finally, Rachline took the mike. He started with a small, intimate story that he knew would draw the crowd close. It was about galette des rois, a cake that the French eat in January, a tradition tied to Epiphany, the Christian holiday. The dessert contains either a bean or a small porcelain figure, and whoever finds it gets to be "king" or "queen" for the day. It is a quintessentially French celebration.

"I see we're not going to have the chance to enjoy the galette tonight," Rachline said. But he explained that it was on his mind because of an email he received from a school principal. "She said, 'You know, Mr. Mayor, the prize inside the cake was a little baby Jesus - and that probably goes against the law enforcing secularism in public spaces.' "

The audience groaned. The National Front embraces laïcité, the secularist principle underlying laws in France that prohibit religious symbols and acts in public spaces like schools and government offices; but it tends to insist on that policy most vociferously when the religious custom in question - head scarves, for example - happens to be Muslim, not Christian.

Rachline continued: "I said, 'Look, the Epiphany cake is a really important tradition for our country.' And I told her, 'It's more natural to find a baby Jesus inside than to find a Turkish delight!' " The audience roared and applauded.

Turkish delight is regarded in France as a North African treat, someone at the event explained to me. It is, in other words, the candy of immigrants, an import, an invader, the likes of which the mayor was there to fend off in the name of French civilization.

Rachline, who has good timing, waited for the crowd to quiet down. "Maybe that shocked her," he said. "But I said you have to get used to it. Because in Fréjus, yes, we do eat the galette des rois with the little baby Jesus inside - and nothing else!"

Over three days in January, the terrorist attacks in and around Paris claimed 17 victims' lives, a national blow to which the French responded almost immediately with a show of unity, including a march that drew upward of a million people. Almost two weeks after the first attack, the spirit of " Je Suis Charlie " - a shorthand expression that came to embody all manner of good intentions - was still strong, but the initial warmth with which even relative strangers in Paris treated one another was already cooling. "Let me guess," a man running a newsstand near my hotel said wearily as a couple approached him with a hopeful look on their faces. "Charlie Hebdo." They had put their name on a waiting list for the first issue published after the attack. He checked his notebook; yes, their turn had finally come. He took their money and handed them the magazine.

On the newsstand, that week's French edition of Elle magazine showed, against a background of pale blue, a simply sketched dove holding a pencil in its beak, an evocation of the drawings for which the illustrators at Charlie Hebdo were targeted. The newspapers were still overwhelmingly focused on the attacks; Libération's front page featured an article about what recent events meant for Le Pen. The news vendor's face soured as I picked it up. "She's over," he said. "She's crazy." Le Pen is often dismissed by Parisians as a kind of scary clown, a divisive menace - maybe even a smart menace, but ultimately a political joke.

Yet a recent poll found that if Le Pen ran for president now, she would finish ahead of all presumed contenders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative former president of France, and François Hollande, the current Socialist president. Much of her party's support comes from regions far from Paris, in areas gutted by deindustrialization or in tiny towns struggling with budget cuts and trying to keep traditional village life going: the local post office, the train station. Both anti-establishment and populist, the National Front has cast itself as a party for the little people, with a mix of proposals that confound current American notions of right and left. Its platform calls for the preservation of local services, protectionist trade policies and higher taxes on the rich. Many of its promises - reduced unemployment, lower taxes on the poor and middle class, more accessible housing - are presented as the logical outgrowth of its sweeping anti-immigration policy, which calls for the "systematic expulsion of all illegal immigrants arriving or living in France," shorter residency permits and the reduction of the yearly immigration rate to 10,000 newcomers, down from 200,000.

The party, well aware of its relative strengths and limitations, made a conscious decision in 2012 to focus on specific towns in the 2014 elections. In the newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Nicolas Lebourg - a French historian who studied party documents related to the training of activists and political interns - laid out the party's calculation: towns were easier to win than cities but would still garner much attention from the news media. The National Front clearly hoped that the visibility of any elected mayors would help the party shed the longstanding stereotype of its typical member: an old guy in a leather jacket, longing for the glory days of France's colonial past, cracking jokes about Arabs and Jews, with little real interest in the tedium of managing a budget. The last time the National Front had several mayors elected, in the 1990s, two of the four became embroiled in widely publicized legal cases while still in office. This time around, the mayors were expected to do better. "Professionalization and entrenchment," Lebourg wrote, "were the two words that kept coming up in regards to the 2014 local elections."

One year into their jobs, the mayors have received extensive press, not all of it good. In Hayange, a steel-manufacturing town in the northeast, the new mayor, Fabien Engelmann, became the object of media controversy when his office sent a halal butcher, who prepares meat according to Muslim law, a letter insisting that he abide by the frequently flouted rule requiring shops to stay closed on Sunday mornings. That same mayor's office also informed a dance teacher hoping to rent space for a North African-style dance class that she could not do so, on the grounds that the class was "incompatible with the National Front." And according to a fellow member of the National Front working in his office, the mayor asked if there was a way to move local merchants of Arab descent farther from the center of town. (The mayor has denied this.) Engelmann is now contesting charges of campaign-finance violations.

Rachline, by contrast, seems determined to be noticed only as a paragon of professionalism. His campaign questioned the building of the town's mosque, but he is no longer standing in its way. He implemented standard, but relatively uncontroversial, National Front policies - cutting a social-service organization's funds, increasing the local police force. Two or three armed officers now stand conspicuously outside the mayor's office, which looks onto an open square with a medieval cathedral on one side.

Rachline was fortunate to have run for office at a moment when the town was in need of a strong manager, if not a savior. Fréjus was in financial crisis when he started his campaign. "We're the fifth-most-indebted town in France," I heard from almost every resident I spoke to.

At an outdoor bar just up the street from the mayor's office, Christine Bertolo, a 60-year-old retired housekeeper, was drinking with three friends. They all happily volunteered that they had voted National Front in the mayoral elections and would most likely vote for Le Pen in 2017. Bertolo - who described herself as "disgusted" by her country's mainstream politicians - characterized Fréjus as a microcosm of France. The former mayor was charged with corruption (also true of Sarkozy), municipal finances were terrible (France's economic growth is lagging) and the quality of life was in steep decline (a complaint heard nationwide). "For 30 years, all the mayors, on the left and on the right, they've been filling their pockets," Bertolo said. "And we're the ones who fall through the holes."

She said what people often say before they admit to voting for the Front: "I'm not racist, but. . . . " What comes next is usually one of the following: "something has to change," "the cost of living is too high," "the politicians have done nothing," "we have too much immigration." Or, in Bertolo's case, "they have lost our trust." She meant the politicians: Hollande has not delivered on his campaign promise to increase taxes on the rich, spending much of his political capital instead on marriage rights for gay couples; Sarkozy, on the right, alienated the working class and was captured on camera telling a farmer to "shove off" (with an added epithet). Possibly, Bertolo said, Le Pen would be better; she could not be worse.

As for Rachline, he had already won her over. She was particularly enthusiastic about his promises to ensure that someone like her, and not just another immigrant in town, received subsidized housing.

In Fréjus, as in the rest of France, the immigrant population does not always feel welcome, and tensions flare. Six years ago, the town endured riots after a young Moroccan man, from a heavily immigrant neighborhood where the mosque is now being built, ran his motorcycle into a tree and died; he was evading a police barricade when he struck the tree.

Starting in the 1950s, an influx of immigrants from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia arrived in France, to meet the country's growing need for labor in its coal mines and factories. But, as the French often put it, officials "parked" those workers and eventually their families in isolated housing projects that bred alienation; the jobs began to disappear, and the expected smooth integration failed to take place. Given the high unemployment in France, Le Pen rails against the arrival of new immigrants, 200,000 of whom have come every year since 2004. Muslims are now thought to make up about 8 percent of the country, and France now has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Four out of 10 French recently surveyed said they considered Muslims "to be a threat to our national identity." Le Pen was playing on those fears a few years ago when she referred to Muslims praying in the streets as an "occupation" of France.

That night in St.-Raphaël, Rachline spoke of his intention to make sure that citizens in Fréjus got housing rather than people "from here and from there." He displayed a cagey sense of how far he could push his rhetoric while remaining within acceptable bounds. His indignant anecdote about the galette was only the beginning; he went on to rouse the crowd with post-Charlie Hebdo talking points, reminding his respectfully hushed audience that the National Front had long predicted just such an attack. "Surely we can no longer wonder whether there might be some connection between this lightning-fast rise of radical fundamentalist Islam and this rampant immigration," he said, "which we knew was the risk, which we have recognized as the danger."

He knew he shouldn't mix all Muslims together, and he didn't, conceding that most were not terrorists after all. "But in Europe recently," he said, in a clearly climactic moment, "all the terrorists are Muslims."

At that moment, as the audience cheered Rachline, I recalled a conversation we had earlier in the day in his office, when I asked him to describe the racial makeup of his high school. "I never count French people based on their origins or their religion," he said. "I always just consider French people as French."

It was strange to hear this liberal sensitivity from Rachline, of all people. He advocates the death penalty for rapists.

But Rachline's deflection on the question of race was not at all surprising to Vincent Pons, a French academic I met in Paris the next day. Pons, a campaign expert - a company he founded provides technological support to candidates - reminded me how difficult it is to map basic American assumptions onto the French political landscape. "In France, officially, we don't have race," he said; it is illegal, for example, to ask about race or religion on any government form. "We just pretend that race does not matter, but it's this crazy thing - of course it matters," he said. "There are no statistics, so you can make no policy around it. But even if you tried, you'd be accused of making too much of race."

Citizenship in France is supposed to confer complete equality, but the National Front, and many French all over the political spectrum, believe that privilege comes with the expectation of strict assimilation - no head scarves in school, no race-based interest groups, no questioning of the baby Jesus in the galette, no balking at the school's lunch of roast pork. When it comes to laïcité, the differences between those on the left, the right and the far right are sometimes most apparent in the varying hostility with which they deliver remarkably similar views.

Pons and I met at a brasserie, where our table was inches from one occupied by an older man, who was bundled in layers, drinking wine and listening in on our conversation until he could hold his tongue no longer. As a former teacher, he wanted to help explain. "There are the français de souche," he said - the "French of the soil," shorthand for the "real" French - and "then there are the French who are only French because they have the right papers." Pons politely pointed out that his own father was Alsatian and that he himself therefore hardly qualified as français de souche. "Eh, I myself am Breton," the man replied, in a friendly nonanswer. He had other opinions to share: The press had overblown the unity march, the students would see that their leaders did nothing and, by the way, that Charlie Hebdo? "It was a rag!" He had been reading a newspaper, which he left behind when he wished us good night and left. It was Présent, a far-right-wing publication. Its headline: "And Anyway - the Problem Really Is Islam!"

To help guide the party's new mayors, the National Front has published what it calls "The Little Practical Guide for Elected City Officials of the National Front." Its introduction states that hundreds of newly elected party officials will be serving as "indispensable conduits for the dissemination of our ideas, and the taking of power in 2017." The guide, which is 107 pages, discusses protocol, explains some basic accounting principles for the uninitiated and exhorts readers to be "smiling and agreeable" in public. Its message is to take courage: "Victory is so close!"

Under Le Pen, the National Front has revived a tradition of controlling its propaganda - with trainings, media coaching, brochures, talking points and economic analyses provided to volunteers and would-be candidates. One evening in Paris last month, Gilles Parmentier, a 21-year-old city councilman from a troubled Parisian suburb, led a training session for the National Front's youth group.

Parmentier started out by indirectly acknowledging a paradox of the National Front: The party is wildly popular and at the same time is so reviled that many of its supporters prefer to keep their allegiance secret. That can make it hard to recruit candidates for office.

"Not everyone wants to have their photo on posters all over town," said Parmentier, who is still a student. "So you could actually think about campaigning in the part of the neighborhood where you don't live - or in a different town. You can use your middle name. Or your maiden name. No one will make the connection, and you'll be safe, in regards to your job, your future and your friends."

In his V-neck sweater and with his hair neatly parted on one side, Parmentier looked as if he had stepped out of a brochure for some small American liberal-arts college. (He would be the one throwing a Frisbee on the green, not the student staring at a Bunsen burner.) He was addressing a crowd of about 30 or so young people, most of whom were male and listening closely. Moving on to the logistics of campaigning, he suggested that anyone interested in building support for the party should simply head to the neighborhoods "where people live in poverty, who live right next to immigrants, who live right next to this misery and poverty, to rampant immigration and Islam and radical fundamentalist Islam." Once you find those people, he advised, you introduce yourself as their savior: "Hello, I'm your National Front representative. I represent Marine and her values. I'm going to help you fix your problems."

Because he was there specifically to coach young party members, he tried to make the case that inexperience need not be equated with incompetence. The National Front has always put young people's careers on the fast track, he pointed out - just look at Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine's niece, who was voted into the National Assembly at 22. And that guy in Fréjus, what was his name again?

"Rachline!" someone called out.

Parmentier had not quite mastered Rachline's gift for drawing the line at just the right place, with just the right smile or euphemism. In criticizing his own town's mayor, with whom he has often feuded, Parmentier described him as having the qualities "of a little king, of a petty tyrant," then, under his breath, "of a Moroccan, or Tunisian, or whatever." He sometimes drifted off midsentence, nervous, only to come bounding back with a show of machismo. He warned his young friends that once you were voted into office, you had to conduct yourself in a manner that reflected well on the party. If some jerk is messing with you, you can't just break his face, he said, though his language was more crass than that.

For more visible positions, Le Pen personally "approves or vetoes every significant candidate in the areas where the National Front has a shot of winning," according to Abel Mestre, who covers the National Front for Le Monde. A team of young volunteers working under Florian Philippot, a party vice president, devotes considerable attention to scanning various candidates' Facebook pages, looking for anything that will embarrass the party or embroil the candidate in legal problems. In mid-December, for example, a departmental candidate in southwestern France reportedly posted on her Facebook page: "Your grandparents fought so you would not become German. . . . fight so you don't become Arab." Party officials claimed that the candidate's site had been hacked.

Like Parmentier, the young people in attendance at the National Front's youth event were almost uniformly earnest, and some showed more polish than their speaker. "We are all patriots here," a young man wearing a tie told me, straightening up as he said it. A young woman said the party's family values appealed to her; a young man said he was tired of answering to Washington and Brussels.

After half an hour, the audience started getting restless. The conversation took one last turn, to a familiar National Front target - local subsidies, often deemed wasteful, to various organizations. "Which association gobbles up the most money?" a young man asked. Another attendee couldn't resist - he called out the name of a Jewish one. The audience laughed.

Two days before I met Marine Le Pen, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, took a call from a Russian reporter and agreed, when asked, that the Paris attacks had "the look of something the Secret Service would have staged." His comments circulated widely in the news media, and Marine Le Pen quickly went out of her way to dismiss them as a "woolly conspiracy theory."

I wondered how those moments played out within the family. Did she ever pick up the phone to let him know that he was meddling with her campaign strategy? "I've stopped doing that," she told me in her office in Nanterre. "He just says, 'I'm a free man. I'll say what I want.' "

Tall, blond, stately and brisk, Le Pen has little of her father's effortless showmanship. Instead, she offers relatability. At 46, she is twice-divorced and a mother of three, her hair held back with a bright plastic clip; a hot-pink e-cigarette sits on her desk. The National Front has never attracted more female voters.

Jean-Marie Le Pen's presidential ambitions were always considered more of a spectacle than a serious prospect. His history of unnerving extreme-right alliances and outrageous provocations was too extensive. Most infamously, he characterized the gas chambers of Nazi Germany as a "detail of World War II history." (Mention his name, and many French will just say, "Detail, detail," with a shake of the head.) Patients who were H.I.V.-positive, he once proposed, should be isolated in an "AIDS-atorium." In 2002, he stunned the country by winning enough votes in the first round of the presidential election to make it to the second; the country, seemingly appalled by its own conduct, then voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, whose margin of victory was about 65 points.

Although Marine Le Pen would most likely fare better than her father, that second round remains a major, if not unmovable, obstacle standing between the National Front and the presidency. Even if she makes it to the runoff, whichever mainstream party loses the first round would almost inevitably direct its voters to support the other mainstream party, an alliance called the "republican front."

Le Pen is nonetheless charging full tilt at the 2017 campaign. She recently added to her team Sébastien Chenu, a former national secretary in France's center-right party (the U.M.P.) and the founder of a gay rights organization that supports same-sex marriage, which the National Front officially opposes. Factions in the party objected to Chenu, loudly. "Yes, there were people who said, 'Another gay,' " Chenu told me. (Philippot, who serves as Le Pen's chief adviser, is also gay.) "But she told them: "This is not a religious sect, it's a political party. I want to win, and I need competent people.' "

In her office, Le Pen acknowledged that there was some dissent in her ranks. "There's always going to be a conservative element in the party," she said, "but I'm always trying to move the party forward a bit. A leader has to be a little avant-garde, to have vision. And to me, Sébastien represents the idea that anyone has a place at the National Front. We don't defend religious or ethnic interests - no, we defend the French. It's like McDonald's," she said, pleased to have landed on a simile that an American reporter would surely appreciate. "Come as you are."

At times, it seems that Le Pen can barely maintain discipline among the factions in her top leadership, much less among the thousands of local candidates posting on their Facebook accounts. In late January, Aymeric Chauprade, then the National Front's chief delegate to the European Union, uploaded a video of himself online saying that France was "at war with Muslims - not with all Muslims, but with Muslims." Invoking the language of the party of yore, he warned of a "fifth column" ready to undermine France from within. Le Pen fired him - she has tried to move away from her father's party's premonitions of civil war - but she could not fire her niece, the assemblywoman, who disseminated Chauprade's video via Twitter despite her aunt's clear directive, partywide, not to promote the delegate's words. Nor could she fire her father, who posted a photo of his daughter, in the middle of the Paris attacks, along with the slogan "Keep Calm and Vote Le Pen." "You have a father, too, right?" she said to me. "You know, you can disagree but still have mutual respect. It's not always easy though, especially in politics."

When her father founded the National Front in the 1970s, it was above all an anti-communist party. These days, in Le Pen's office, a framed poster leans against the wall; it shows a giant hand of God pointing down at a mass of small, suffering people under "Remember the Hungry" in Russian. "A Russian friend gave it to me," Le Pen said. "It's a vintage poster from the Russian Revolution." Le Pen, who vocally supports President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in his dispute with Ukraine, recently borrowed millions of dollars from a Russian bank - none of the French ones, she has complained, would lend her money.

One of Le Pen's most polarizing proposals is that France abandon the euro, which her critics argue would bring ruin to the economy - and it might be one of many reasons French banks would be disinclined to help her. It is also why many people consider her an unrealistic presidential candidate, whatever her poll numbers.

"At the end of the day," a French friend of mine in the finance world told me, "there are too many people with too much money who would do anything to make sure it doesn't happen. It can't happen."

Hénin-Beaumont, a former coal-mining town in the country's north, is one of those seemingly rare towns in France with no tourism to speak of. A large mall is a main employer, along with a factory that turns chicken into nuggets.

Its downtown is unexceptional - a pharmacy, a Domino's pizza, some small shops - but last year it drew crowds from all over the region at Christmastime. On the day a new Christmas market opened in the square, a Santa Claus rappelled down from the clock tower on the 90-year-old town hall, then threw out to the assembled children hundreds of bags filled with chocolates and other candy. There was a laser show; families and visitors skated on a temporary rink. People shopped to the sound of a Czech chorus singing carols in the square.

A month later, people were still talking about the festival, especially when the name of the new mayor, Steeve Briois, came up. "I can say nothing bad about him," said Mary-Renée Boutaleb, who is 58 and has lived in Hénin-Beaumont most of her adult life. "The Christmas market was beautiful." But it clearly pained her, at least a little, to admit it, given that Briois is a National Front mayor, the first in the town's history. Briois is one of five party vice presidents, a linchpin in an area crucial for Le Pen, according to James Shields, the author of "The Extreme Right in France" and a professor of French politics at Aston University.

"From where she is now, being president is unrealistic," Shields told me. "But winning a region would say to the parties on the mainstream right and left: 'Now we're a big player. Do you want us to take more regions from you next time?' Her strategy is to become irresistible as an alliance partner."

For decades, Hénin-Beaumont and the surrounding region voted left in huge numbers. The workers there, and in most of northern France, were considered the base of the Socialist Party, the ouvriers who regarded it as their protector and advocate. But last March, the town flipped. More than 50 percent of its voters backed Briois, who ran on a campaign promising tax relief and competence; the previous Socialist mayor was sentenced to four years in prison for abusing public funds and left the town deep in debt.

Boutaleb and her husband, Moussa, a retired welder, served coffee and small chocolates on a modern silver set when I visited their home in January. Moussa, a sturdy, proud man of 59 - he had been the president of the mosque in Hénin-Beaumont - looked down at his coffee. He adjusted his square saucer, lining it up with the edge of the table, the sound of the cup rattling quietly in his living room. And then he made a confession to his wife: Yes, he said, yes, he could imagine voting for Le Pen.

His wife was silent, but her face was a mask of reproach. She clearly received this news as a wound rather than as some difference of opinion. His statement hung in the air for a long, uncomfortable minute.

"Me, never," she said when the same question was put to her. "The party scares me. It scares me for my children."

Moussa's parents were French citizens born in Algeria when it was still a French department; his wife's family is French, going back many centuries. Mary-Renée knew some of the National Front deputies in town; she knew with total certainty, she said, that there were racists among them.

"There are racists in the P.S., too," Moussa said, referring to the Socialist Party. And France, he said, had had enough - enough immigration, enough bullying from the European Union, enough bad leadership. "It lost its luster," he said, rattling his spoon. "Its hands are tied." And although he said he was humane - he felt that people have a right to live better lives - even he, the child of Algerians, could not support how much immigration France allowed. "It makes it hard for the immigrants who are already here," he said.

Mary-Renée could understand why the party had picked up strength. "They take in anyone unhappy," she said, "the people who are worried about immigration, the unemployed, the racists." In one sense, it had something for everyone, she said, but it also had baggage she could not ignore.

When Briois started campaigning for the National Front as a teenager 27 years ago, he was an outcast - students called him a Nazi, teachers picked political fights with him in class. Once an object of contempt, he is now the wildly popular mayor, someone Moussa admires for his efficiency, his hard work, the LED lights he installed throughout town.

"He's very close to the people," Moussa said. "He's a humanist." Moussa recalled the days in the late 1990s when Briois campaigned heavily against the mosque, which Moussa and his colleagues were then trying to establish. "He was handing out fliers," he said. So what changed for Briois, for Moussa? After a long silence, Moussa answered: "The party changed."

After the attacks in Paris, Briois personally reached out to the mosque to let its members know that he stood with them and to invite them to a rally in town. The Socialist community refused to attend the mayor's rally - the Socialists held their own - but many Muslims did. That was the National Front that Moussa was seeing, not the young activist at the youth group or the mayor targeting a Muslim merchant in a town 200 miles away or the prominent public figures suggesting that millions of Muslims want to attack the French. Even if Le Pen is never elected president, the party could succeed another way: by pulling the right further right, mainstreaming and normalizing hostility toward anyone who does not conform to their notion of what it means to be French.

On a car ride to the train station, Moussa and I talked a little bit about his family. He and his wife had taken in a foster child, and he had an older son living in Lille, a major city nearby. He was proud of his son, who had a good job as an engineer at an energy company. But his son told his parents that ever since the attacks, he felt uncomfortable in France. Moussa sounded distracted as he was driving, but he kept talking. His son, he said, is dark-skinned like him. Now he was thinking about leaving the country altogether. He worried that he could "find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. France was his home, but anything could happen there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The National Front's Post-Charlie Hebdo Moment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In St.-Raphaël, the rain started coming down in earnest as the crowd crammed into the small, windowless office. Rachline squeezed his way through, clutching forearms and giving one supporter after another a double kiss. The smell of cigarette smoke and wet wool filled the air; the office, hot, packed and bright, seemed just barely able to contain the ambition and emotion and pride of the moment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Les attentats que nous connaissons depuis hier, 13 novembre, nous choquent tous. Nous vous proposons, parents, adultes, de relire cette interview de la pédopsychiatre Catherine Jousselme qui, au moment des attentats de janvier 2015, nous expliquait comment les enfants réagissent à des évènements violents de ce type et comment nous pouvons leur en parler.
Les enfants, petits et grands, qu'ils aient été confrontés à l'information directement ou pas, ressentent cette atmosphère et nos sentiments très vifs. La première chose à faire, quel que soit l'âge de vos enfants, est de les informer directement.
Il faut leur expliquer ce qui s'est passé : un attentat, des morts, des gens qui ne veulent pas qu'on exprime librement ses idées. Bien sûr, suivant l'âge des enfants, les réponses et les explications seront différentes. Le professeur Catherine Jousselme, pédopsychiatre à la Fondation Vallée à Gentilly, nous aide à trouver les bons mots et les bonnes réactions.
Avec un petit de moins de 6 ans, Catherine Jousselme conseille de ne pas montrer d'images et d'en rester à l'information de base. Les adultes doivent dire que ce qui vient de se passer est grave pour tout le pays, que cela les touche et les émeut. Surtout, les enfants doivent comprendre que les adultes sont là et s'organisent pour protéger tous les habitants de la France.
Les enfants plus grands, jusqu'à 10 ou 11 ans, doivent pouvoir en parler. À leurs questions, mais sans les devancer, il faut apporter des réponses factuelles. Les échanges avec vous doivent aussi leur permettre de comprendre que les adultes, et l'État, veillent à ce que cela ne se reproduise pas, que les coupables sont recherchés et que la fraternité et la solidarité sont les seules réponses possibles. Parler avec eux, leur proposer de dessiner ce qu'ils ont compris, expliquer les images s'ils y ont été confrontés : ce sont des façons simples de leur permettre de juguler des inquiétudes et des angoisses qui pourraient les envahir.
Cependant les enfants ne réagissent pas tous de la même façon et certains seront plus touchés que d'autres malgré l'attention des parents. Un enfant qui ferait des cauchemars fréquents dans les semaines qui viennent, qui perdrait le goût de jouer ou de manger devra être l'objet d'une attention toute particulière. Il faudra l'inciter à s'exprimer, en discutant, en dessinant avec lui. Voire en lui permettant de rencontrer un professionnel - médecin, psychologue, psychiatre - qui saura l'aider.
Les adolescents sont eux exposés à l'information très directement via internet et les réseaux sociaux. Plus ils sont informés, plus il est nécessaire d'être présent auprès d'eux. Il faut les aider à cadrer leurs réactions et redonner des informations simples sur la loi qui protège la liberté d'expression et pose l'interdit du meurtre ainsi que la nécessité d'être solidaires face à un événement d'une telle violence qu'elle peut entraîner des réactions en chaîne. Il est important qu'ils sentent que les adultes sont des soutiens solides, tant dans la famille qu'à l'école.
Certains peuvent être confrontés à des propos violents d'autres adolescents autour d'eux ou sur les réseaux sociaux. S'ils vous rapportent ces propos, il faut les assurer que la réponse n'est pas dans cette spirale de la violence et signaler éventuellement ces comportements au collège ou au lycée. Ce sont aux adultes de régler ces questions, pas à eux. Enfin, il ne faut pas les laisser seuls confrontés à toutes les images auxquelles ils ont accès si facilement sur leurs téléphones, leurs ordinateurs ou à la télévision. Ce flot d'images peut être très angoissant et les enfermer dans une vision très dégradée de la vie en société. Aidez-les à faire autre chose et à discuter, notamment à l'aide de ce document réalisé par le magazine Astrapi.

La citation de Martin Luther King, reproduite dans un poster publié dans le n° 848 du 15 novembre d'Astrapi, est illustrée par Aurélie Grand.
Propos de Catherine Jousselme recueillis par Hélène Hauri.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Attentats de Paris : comment répondre aux questions des enfants ? - Actualités Bayard Jeunesse

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interview de la pédopsychiatre Catherine Jousselme qui pour les attentats de 2015, nous expliquait comment les enfants réagissent à des évènements violents.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
POLICE - Une fresque peinte sur un mur de Grenoble, représentant une Marianne matraquée par deux policiers, suscitait dimanche 27 juin une polémique d'autant plus vive que l'oeuvre a été réalisée dans le cadre d'un festival de street art subventionné par la mairie écologiste.

L'oeuvre, de l'artiste Goin, représente une femme à terre, tenant un drapeau bleu-blanc-rouge effiloché, frappée par deux policiers anti-émeute. "Je trouve ceci indigne", a réagi le directeur départemental de la sécurité publique, Patrick Mairesse, cité par le quotidien régional Le Dauphine Libéré.

Grenoble s'en prend à la police, à l'Etat. Démagogie irresponsable ! Le maire finance et dit "ni excuses ni regret." pic.twitter.com/XKPlEPotTS
- JeanCristian Larrain (@Larrain_fr) 27 juin 2016

Polémique fresque liberté à Grenoble
"Quand la collectivité locale finance, sur l'argent des contribuables grenoblois, une fresque réalisée dans le cadre d'un festival subventionné à hauteur de 25.000 euros, à la vue de tous, dans l'espace public, elle est responsable des messages passés. Par respect pour ceux qui nous protègent, il faut effacer immédiatement cette fresque inacceptable dans le contexte", a souligné l'ancienne ministre socialiste Geneviève Fioraso, dont le parti appartient à l'opposition à la municipalité menée par Eric Piolle (EELV).

Pour Debout la France, cette fresque "de la honte" est "abjecte" et doit être retirée immédiatement par la municipalité. Dans un tweet, le ministre de l'Intérieur Bernard Cazeneuve a affiché son "plein soutien aux policiers qui protègent chaque jour les Grenoblois" et a estimé que ces derniers attendaient du maire "qu'il leur dise ses regrets".

Lundi 27 juin, Eric Piolle, le maire de Grenoble a rétorqué ironiquement à Bernard Cazeneuve qu'il n'avait qu'à "transmette aux artistes la liste de ce qu'ils ont droit de faire ou pas".

"Il faut que @BCazeneuve transmette aux artistes la liste de ce qu'ils ont droit de faire ou pas" pic.twitter.com/A8lHjn5pyt
- Nabil Touati (@salam93) 27 juin 2016

"Nous, en tant que politiques, on s'interdit de vouloir gérer la création artistique", a-t-on répliqué au cabinet du maire, où on relève le "grand succès" du Grenoble Street Art Fest. "On comprend la réaction de la police et d'autres, mais ça reste une oeuvre d'art et l'art peut être subversif", fait-on valoir. "L'art a vocation à créer du débat, voire de la polémique", a-t-on ajouté, avant que le ministre eut fait connaître ses demandes. Le responsable a précisé que la fresque contestée avait été réalisée sur un mur du quartier de la gare qui doit être détruit "dans les jours ou les semaines qui viennent" dans le cadre de travaux programmés.

Lire aussi :* Une nouvelle affiche de la CGT sur la police et la loi Travail fait polémique* Ces supporters irlandais se sont bien amusés avec la police française* Pour suivre les dernières actualités en direct sur Le HuffPost, cliquez ici* Tous les matins, recevez gratuitement la newsletter du HuffPost
* Retrouvez-nous sur notre page Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cette fresque sur la police à Grenoble fait polémique

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
POLICE - Une fresque peinte sur un mur de Grenoble, représentant une Marianne matraquée par deux policiers, suscitait dimanche 27 juin une polémique d'autant plus vive que l'oeuvre a été réalisée dans le cadre d'un festival de street art subventionné par la mairie écologiste.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Par Caroline Piquet

Ces éléments, issus de la Mutuelle générale de la police, se sont retrouvés sans protection sur un fichier en ligne. Selon son président Benoît Briatte, il s'agit d'un acte malveillant venant de l'un de ses collaborateurs.

Deux semaines après le double meurtre d'un couple de policiers à Magnanville, l'affaire est embarrassante. Les coordonnées personnelles de 112.000 policiers, adhérents de la Mutuelle générale de la police (MGP), ont été abusivement diffusées sur le web, révèle RTL ce lundi. "La MGP a été victime d'un acte malveillant de manière intentionnelle de la part d'un de ses collaborateurs", nous a confirmé son président Benoît Briatte, qui a déposé plainte jeudi dernier.

Les faits se sont déroulés à l'agence de Limoges en Haute-Vienne, où un employé de la mutuelle a extrait un fichier interne regroupant les données personnelles de dizaines de milliers d'adhérents pour les transférer vers Google Drive, un service de stockage et de partage de fichiers dans le cloud. "Ce fichier se trouvait sur un serveur sécurisé, uniquement accessible aux salariés habilités", reprend Benoît Briatte. "Ce collaborateur a donc agi au mépris de toutes les règles de confidentialité et de déontologie internes à l'entreprise".

Numéros de téléphone, adresses mail, adresses postales... Toutes ces informations se sont retrouvées en ligne, sans protection particulière. En effet, quiconque dispose actuellement du lien URL de ce document en ligne peut consulter la liste des noms. "Mais il faut avoir le lien", insiste le président de la MGP. A-t-il été partagé à des tiers en dehors de l'entreprise? Il est encore trop tôt pour le savoir. "Mais je pense qu'il y a plus de peur que de mal", commente le gérant, qui a pris de nouvelles mesures de sécurité en interne, dès le 6 juin. "On a ajouté un niveau de contrôle supplémentaire lorsque les salariés veulent accéder aux données des clients".

Un salarié "comme les autres"

La Mutuelle des policiers est pourtant habituée aux attaques informatiques. "Comme nos adhérents sont des policiers, c'est très régulier", reprend Benoît Briatte. "Mais quand la menace vient de l'intérieur, c'est plus compliqué". La date exacte du piratage n'est pas encore connue. L'entreprise aurait commencé à avoir des doutes le 2 juin dernier, après avoir remarqué des "échanges bizarres" entre plusieurs salariés et l'employé suspecté. Selon RTL, ce dernier aurait agi par vengeance pour une histoire de prime non versée. Une version que le président de la MGP refuse de confirmer: "il ne nie pas les faits mais n'a pas expliqué sa démarche", précise Benoît Briatte, qui décrit "un salarié comme les autres, présent dans l'entreprise depuis plusieurs années". Dans l'attente, il a été suspendu de ses fonctions et risque le licenciement.

Une enquête judiciaire a été ouverte à Toulouse la semaine dernière et des poursuites civiles ont été engagées. À la demande de la justice, Google devrait effacer ces données sensibles. À l'heure où la protection des forces de l'ordre est une priorité, ce piratage tombe très mal. "C'est très grave, surtout dans le contexte actuel", commente une source policière, qui a souhaité garder l'anonymat. "Ce type de désagrément engendre de l'inquiétude chez les fonctionnaires mais aussi dans leurs familles". D'autant que la MGP est l'une des mutuelles qui comptent le plus d'adhérents parmi les policiers et les agents du ministère de l'Intérieur. "Préviendront-ils les adhérents concernés?"

Cette même source policière s'interroge aussi sur le timing: les deux policiers tués à Magnanville, "Jessica Schneider et Jean-Baptiste Salvaing étaient adhérents de la MGP. Ils sont décédés le 13 juin, la fuite a eu lieu avant le 6... Pour le moment, on n'établit pas de lien mais on peut s'interroger". "C'est extrêmement préoccupant", renchérit sur RTL Nicolas Comte, secrétaire général adjoint du syndicat Unité SGP Police-FO, qui réclame des institutions qu'elles "renforcent leur sécurité".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Les données personnelles de 112.000 policiers ont fuité sur le web

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Par Caroline Piquet Ces éléments, issus de la Mutuelle générale de la police, se sont retrouvés sans protection sur un fichier en ligne. Selon son président Benoît Briatte, il s'agit d'un acte malveillant venant de l'un de ses collaborateurs. Deux semaines après le double meurtre d'un couple de policiers à Magnanville, l'affaire est embarrassante.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Par Yohan Blavignat

VIDÉO - Me Corentin Delobel s'est fait passer pour l'ancien conseil de Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Selon nos informations, ce dernier n'a jamais défendu le terroriste. Il est convoqué mercredi par le bâtonnier de Nice en vue d'éventuelles sanctions disciplinaires.

Son visage et ses descriptions de Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, le terroriste qui a tué 84 personnes jeudi dernier à Nice, ont été repris par toutes les rédactions. Me Corentin Delobel, avocat du barreau de Nice, disait en effet avoir défendu ce Tunisien lors d'un procès pour violences en mars dernier. Selon nos informations, il n'avait pourtant jamais eu comme client Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, et a tout inventé. Enchaînant les déclarations publiques, il a imaginé le profil d'un homme qu'il n'a jamais défendu. Ses motivations restent encore à éclaircir. Il est convoqué mercredi à 10 heures par le bâtonnier de Nice en vue d'éventuelles poursuites disciplinaires.

Au sein des avocats de la ville, l'homme est présenté comme "un cas à part". Me Corentin Delobel a déjà fait parler de lui dans le passé. Interpellé par le bâtonnier de l'ordre des avocats de Nice, Me Jacques Randon, samedi après-midi, et alors qu'il a déjà accordé plusieurs interviews, l'avocat a parlé d'une "méprise", rapporte Le Parisien. Or, dès le lendemain, Me Delobel a accordé au moins une interview supplémentaire.

" LIRE AUSSI: Attentat de Nice: qui est Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, le tueur au camion?

Un homme décrit comme "fragile"

Selon nos informations, le bâtonnier de Nice est très partagé sur les sanctions à adopter contre cet avocat. L'homme a en effet persisté dans son mépris de la déontologie, ce qui peut lui valoir une lourde sanction disciplinaire, mais il est également décrit comme "fragile" par la profession. Le véritable ex-avocat de Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel a pour sa part fait valoir qu'il ne souhaitait pas communiquer à la presse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Il se prétendait avocat du terroriste de Nice... il ne l'a jamais été

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Par Yohan Blavignat VIDÉO - Me Corentin Delobel s'est fait passer pour l'ancien conseil de Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Selon nos informations, ce dernier n'a jamais défendu le terroriste. Il est convoqué mercredi par le bâtonnier de Nice en vue d'éventuelles sanctions disciplinaires.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Après avoir expliqué le racisme à sa fille (Seuil, 1998 puis 2009), et l'islam aux enfants et à leurs parents (Seuil, 2012), l'écrivain marocain Tahar Ben Jelloun aborde la question du terrorisme.

Sous la forme d'un bref dialogue, le poète tente d'expliquer aux enfants un sujet que les adultes eux-mêmes sont bien en peine de comprendre : le terrorisme. Qu'est-ce qui pousse des gens souvent très jeunes à vouloir semer la mort ? Quels mécanismes poussent à l'endoctrinement puis à la violence la plus extrême ? Depuis quand remonte le terrorisme ? Et pourquoi faut-il absolument le dissocier de la résistance et de la religion ?

"Aujourd'hui l'islam est agité comme un drapeau par des barbares ignorants [...] Il faut arrêter de croire que les djihadistes sont fous, cela les déresponsabilise."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Tahar Ben Jelloun explique le terrorisme aux enfants

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Après avoir expliqué le racisme à sa fille (Seuil, 1998 puis 2009), et l'islam aux enfants et à leurs parents (Seuil, 2012), l'écrivain marocain Tahar Ben Jelloun aborde la question du terrorisme. Sous la forme d'un bref dialogue, le poète tente d'expliquer aux enfants un sujet que les adultes eux-mêmes sont bien en peine de comprendre : le terrorisme.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, plus que des mots, des valeurs qui font la France. Pour faire (re)découvrir aux enfants, aux jeunes et aux moins jeunes le sens de notre devise nationale, le Gouvernement lance une campagne sur les...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
POLITIQUE - Merci, mais non merci. Ils s'appellent Emma, Lola, Jules et Robin, et c'est à peu près le message qu'ils ont adressé ce mardi 5 juillet au président de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Laurent Wauquiez, dans une lettre ouverte publiée sur Rue89 Lyon.

Bacheliers ayant obtenu la mention "Très Bien", ils expriment leur opposition à la bourse au mérite mise en place par l'élu de droite, qui offre aux lycéens décrochant la plus haute mention la somme de 500 euros. Ils vont accepter l'argent mais le reverser à des associations.

"En tant que lycéen.ne.s concerné.e.s par cette 'bourse au mérite', nous avons décidé d'agir pour une Région plus juste. Nous refusons d'utiliser cette prime pour un usage personnel, d'autant que cette distribution de fonds publics se fait en parallèle d'un désengagement massif de la Région du secteur associatif, qui se traduit par un recul des services publics d'intérêt général", écrivent, sans détour, ces lycéens scolarisés au lycée Saint-Exupéry de Lyon.

"Nous considérons que cet argent ne nous revient pas, puisque nous en éprouvons moins le besoin que d'autres. Nous avons ainsi décidé de reverser les 500 euros que vous nous accordez à une association d'intérêt général", poursuivent-ils, en référence à une triste réalité: les jeunes issus d'un milieu privilégié réussissent mieux que ceux venant d'un milieu modeste. Emma, Lola, Jules et Robin appellent d'autres bacheliers à en faire de même.

"Nous avons donc décidé de faire don de la somme qui nous revient de cette 'bourse' au Réseau Rhône-Ain-Saône, qui rassemble les MJC de l'Ain, du Rhône et de la métropole de Lyon", précisent-ils, faisant valoir que "ces structures pour et par les habitants agissent localement pour un meilleur accès à l'éducation et à la culture, pour l'expression de la citoyenneté, dans une optique de renforcement du lien social et de la solidarité par la rencontre et l'insertion sociale".
Financement d'associations contre une "mesure inappropriée et partiale"
Outre l'injustice provoquée par le déterminisme social qu'ils dénoncent, les lycéens ont dans le viseur le désengagement conséquent de la région du financement d'associations.

"Cette mesure inappropriée et partiale coûte environ 3 millions d'euros à la Région Auvergne Rhône Alpes, tandis que le budget alloué à la vie associative connaît de sévères diminutions. De nombreuses associations à but non lucratif ont vu leurs subventions fortement baisser depuis votre élection", poursuivent les lycéens, qui dressent la liste non-exhaustive des nombreuses structures associatives qui ont subi des coupes de subventions dans la Région, comme le déploraient plusieurs associations LGBT en décembre.

Au HuffPost, Emma, l'une des lycéennes à l'origine de cette lettre ouverte, explique que cette idée a germé "très tôt dans l'année scolaire". "On a pris cette initiative quand on a appris que cette bourse allait être octroyée sans conditions de revenus, ce qu'on trouve injuste", indique celle qui poursuivra ses études en fac d'histoire l'an prochain. Leur appel a-t-il eu un écho auprès des autres lycéens? "Pour le moment, on reçoit surtout des messages de soutien", répond Emma, qui indique néanmoins que des lycéens "dans deux autres départements" sont tentés de les imiter.

La région a indiqué mardi vouloir étendre son dispositif avec une "Bourse au mérite", du même montant, récompensant des élèves "ayant réalisé un parcours remarquable". "Il est très important pour nous de valoriser et récompenser les efforts accomplis et d'accompagner nos jeunes dans les meilleures conditions pour la suite de leurs études", indique la région dans un communiqué.

La politique de l'ex-maire du Puy-en-Velay à la tête de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes est marquée par des décisions conservatrices et polémiques. Parmi d'autres, l'installation d'une crèche de 14 mètres carrés dans le hall de l'hôtel de Région. Une initiative qui avait valu à Laurent Wauquiez les honneurs du Front national en séance plénière.

Lire aussi :
* Macron avait mieux à faire qu'écouter le discours de Philippe

* Applications, sites web... Comment obtenir les résultats

* Résultats du bac, orientation, ils racontent comment ils ont déçu leurs parents

* Pour suivre les dernières actualités en direct sur Le HuffPost, cliquez ici

* Tous les matins, recevez gratuitement la newsletter du HuffPost

* Retrouvez-nous sur notre page Facebook

À voir également sur Le HuffPost:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ces bacheliers refusent la bourse au mérite de 500 euros promise par Wauquiez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
POLITIQUE - Merci, mais non merci. Ils s'appellent Emma, Lola, Jules et Robin, et c'est à peu près le message qu'ils ont adressé ce mardi 5 juillet au président de la région Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Laurent Wauquiez, dans une lettre ouverte publiée sur Rue89 Lyon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Une candidate de The Voice rattrapée par des tweets controversés Samedi soir, peu après 22h30, les téléspectateurs de TF1 ont découvert le visage et la voix de Mennel. Cette Bisontine de 22 ans a...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.embed_code
Post by lefigaro.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In St.-Raphaël, the rain started coming down in earnest as the crowd crammed into the small, windowless office. Rachline squeezed his way through, clutching forearms and giving one supporter after another a double kiss. The smell of cigarette smoke and wet wool filled the air; the office, hot, packed and bright, seemed just barely able to contain the ambition and emotion and pride of the moment. "David Rachline is the sixth-most-important person in the National Front," Rachline's chief aide, Julien Jouniaux, a former prison guard, told me earlier in the day.

Finally, Rachline took the mike. He started with a small, intimate story that he knew would draw the crowd close. It was about galette des rois, a cake that the French eat in January, a tradition tied to Epiphany, the Christian holiday. The dessert contains either a bean or a small porcelain figure, and whoever finds it gets to be "king" or "queen" for the day. It is a quintessentially French celebration.

"I see we're not going to have the chance to enjoy the galette tonight," Rachline said. But he explained that it was on his mind because of an email he received from a school principal. "She said, 'You know, Mr. Mayor, the prize inside the cake was a little baby Jesus - and that probably goes against the law enforcing secularism in public spaces.' "

The audience groaned. The National Front embraces laïcité, the secularist principle underlying laws in France that prohibit religious symbols and acts in public spaces like schools and government offices; but it tends to insist on that policy most vociferously when the religious custom in question - head scarves, for example - happens to be Muslim, not Christian.

Rachline continued: "I said, 'Look, the Epiphany cake is a really important tradition for our country.' And I told her, 'It's more natural to find a baby Jesus inside than to find a Turkish delight!' " The audience roared and applauded.

Turkish delight is regarded in France as a North African treat, someone at the event explained to me. It is, in other words, the candy of immigrants, an import, an invader, the likes of which the mayor was there to fend off in the name of French civilization.

Rachline, who has good timing, waited for the crowd to quiet down. "Maybe that shocked her," he said. "But I said you have to get used to it. Because in Fréjus, yes, we do eat the galette des rois with the little baby Jesus inside - and nothing else!"

Over three days in January, the terrorist attacks in and around Paris claimed 17 victims' lives, a national blow to which the French responded almost immediately with a show of unity, including a march that drew upward of a million people. Almost two weeks after the first attack, the spirit of " Je Suis Charlie " - a shorthand expression that came to embody all manner of good intentions - was still strong, but the initial warmth with which even relative strangers in Paris treated one another was already cooling. "Let me guess," a man running a newsstand near my hotel said wearily as a couple approached him with a hopeful look on their faces. "Charlie Hebdo." They had put their name on a waiting list for the first issue published after the attack. He checked his notebook; yes, their turn had finally come. He took their money and handed them the magazine.

On the newsstand, that week's French edition of Elle magazine showed, against a background of pale blue, a simply sketched dove holding a pencil in its beak, an evocation of the drawings for which the illustrators at Charlie Hebdo were targeted. The newspapers were still overwhelmingly focused on the attacks; Libération's front page featured an article about what recent events meant for Le Pen. The news vendor's face soured as I picked it up. "She's over," he said. "She's crazy." Le Pen is often dismissed by Parisians as a kind of scary clown, a divisive menace - maybe even a smart menace, but ultimately a political joke.

Yet a recent poll found that if Le Pen ran for president now, she would finish ahead of all presumed contenders, including Nicolas Sarkozy, a conservative former president of France, and François Hollande, the current Socialist president. Much of her party's support comes from regions far from Paris, in areas gutted by deindustrialization or in tiny towns struggling with budget cuts and trying to keep traditional village life going: the local post office, the train station. Both anti-establishment and populist, the National Front has cast itself as a party for the little people, with a mix of proposals that confound current American notions of right and left. Its platform calls for the preservation of local services, protectionist trade policies and higher taxes on the rich. Many of its promises - reduced unemployment, lower taxes on the poor and middle class, more accessible housing - are presented as the logical outgrowth of its sweeping anti-immigration policy, which calls for the "systematic expulsion of all illegal immigrants arriving or living in France," shorter residency permits and the reduction of the yearly immigration rate to 10,000 newcomers, down from 200,000.

The party, well aware of its relative strengths and limitations, made a conscious decision in 2012 to focus on specific towns in the 2014 elections. In the newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Nicolas Lebourg - a French historian who studied party documents related to the training of activists and political interns - laid out the party's calculation: towns were easier to win than cities but would still garner much attention from the news media. The National Front clearly hoped that the visibility of any elected mayors would help the party shed the longstanding stereotype of its typical member: an old guy in a leather jacket, longing for the glory days of France's colonial past, cracking jokes about Arabs and Jews, with little real interest in the tedium of managing a budget. The last time the National Front had several mayors elected, in the 1990s, two of the four became embroiled in widely publicized legal cases while still in office. This time around, the mayors were expected to do better. "Professionalization and entrenchment," Lebourg wrote, "were the two words that kept coming up in regards to the 2014 local elections."

One year into their jobs, the mayors have received extensive press, not all of it good. In Hayange, a steel-manufacturing town in the northeast, the new mayor, Fabien Engelmann, became the object of media controversy when his office sent a halal butcher, who prepares meat according to Muslim law, a letter insisting that he abide by the frequently flouted rule requiring shops to stay closed on Sunday mornings. That same mayor's office also informed a dance teacher hoping to rent space for a North African-style dance class that she could not do so, on the grounds that the class was "incompatible with the National Front." And according to a fellow member of the National Front working in his office, the mayor asked if there was a way to move local merchants of Arab descent farther from the center of town. (The mayor has denied this.) Engelmann is now contesting charges of campaign-finance violations.

Rachline, by contrast, seems determined to be noticed only as a paragon of professionalism. His campaign questioned the building of the town's mosque, but he is no longer standing in its way. He implemented standard, but relatively uncontroversial, National Front policies - cutting a social-service organization's funds, increasing the local police force. Two or three armed officers now stand conspicuously outside the mayor's office, which looks onto an open square with a medieval cathedral on one side.

Rachline was fortunate to have run for office at a moment when the town was in need of a strong manager, if not a savior. Fréjus was in financial crisis when he started his campaign. "We're the fifth-most-indebted town in France," I heard from almost every resident I spoke to.

At an outdoor bar just up the street from the mayor's office, Christine Bertolo, a 60-year-old retired housekeeper, was drinking with three friends. They all happily volunteered that they had voted National Front in the mayoral elections and would most likely vote for Le Pen in 2017. Bertolo - who described herself as "disgusted" by her country's mainstream politicians - characterized Fréjus as a microcosm of France. The former mayor was charged with corruption (also true of Sarkozy), municipal finances were terrible (France's economic growth is lagging) and the quality of life was in steep decline (a complaint heard nationwide). "For 30 years, all the mayors, on the left and on the right, they've been filling their pockets," Bertolo said. "And we're the ones who fall through the holes."

She said what people often say before they admit to voting for the Front: "I'm not racist, but. . . . " What comes next is usually one of the following: "something has to change," "the cost of living is too high," "the politicians have done nothing," "we have too much immigration." Or, in Bertolo's case, "they have lost our trust." She meant the politicians: Hollande has not delivered on his campaign promise to increase taxes on the rich, spending much of his political capital instead on marriage rights for gay couples; Sarkozy, on the right, alienated the working class and was captured on camera telling a farmer to "shove off" (with an added epithet). Possibly, Bertolo said, Le Pen would be better; she could not be worse.

As for Rachline, he had already won her over. She was particularly enthusiastic about his promises to ensure that someone like her, and not just another immigrant in town, received subsidized housing.

In Fréjus, as in the rest of France, the immigrant population does not always feel welcome, and tensions flare. Six years ago, the town endured riots after a young Moroccan man, from a heavily immigrant neighborhood where the mosque is now being built, ran his motorcycle into a tree and died; he was evading a police barricade when he struck the tree.

Starting in the 1950s, an influx of immigrants from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia arrived in France, to meet the country's growing need for labor in its coal mines and factories. But, as the French often put it, officials "parked" those workers and eventually their families in isolated housing projects that bred alienation; the jobs began to disappear, and the expected smooth integration failed to take place. Given the high unemployment in France, Le Pen rails against the arrival of new immigrants, 200,000 of whom have come every year since 2004. Muslims are now thought to make up about 8 percent of the country, and France now has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Four out of 10 French recently surveyed said they considered Muslims "to be a threat to our national identity." Le Pen was playing on those fears a few years ago when she referred to Muslims praying in the streets as an "occupation" of France.

That night in St.-Raphaël, Rachline spoke of his intention to make sure that citizens in Fréjus got housing rather than people "from here and from there." He displayed a cagey sense of how far he could push his rhetoric while remaining within acceptable bounds. His indignant anecdote about the galette was only the beginning; he went on to rouse the crowd with post-Charlie Hebdo talking points, reminding his respectfully hushed audience that the National Front had long predicted just such an attack. "Surely we can no longer wonder whether there might be some connection between this lightning-fast rise of radical fundamentalist Islam and this rampant immigration," he said, "which we knew was the risk, which we have recognized as the danger."

He knew he shouldn't mix all Muslims together, and he didn't, conceding that most were not terrorists after all. "But in Europe recently," he said, in a clearly climactic moment, "all the terrorists are Muslims."

At that moment, as the audience cheered Rachline, I recalled a conversation we had earlier in the day in his office, when I asked him to describe the racial makeup of his high school. "I never count French people based on their origins or their religion," he said. "I always just consider French people as French."

It was strange to hear this liberal sensitivity from Rachline, of all people. He advocates the death penalty for rapists.

But Rachline's deflection on the question of race was not at all surprising to Vincent Pons, a French academic I met in Paris the next day. Pons, a campaign expert - a company he founded provides technological support to candidates - reminded me how difficult it is to map basic American assumptions onto the French political landscape. "In France, officially, we don't have race," he said; it is illegal, for example, to ask about race or religion on any government form. "We just pretend that race does not matter, but it's this crazy thing - of course it matters," he said. "There are no statistics, so you can make no policy around it. But even if you tried, you'd be accused of making too much of race."

Citizenship in France is supposed to confer complete equality, but the National Front, and many French all over the political spectrum, believe that privilege comes with the expectation of strict assimilation - no head scarves in school, no race-based interest groups, no questioning of the baby Jesus in the galette, no balking at the school's lunch of roast pork. When it comes to laïcité, the differences between those on the left, the right and the far right are sometimes most apparent in the varying hostility with which they deliver remarkably similar views.

Pons and I met at a brasserie, where our table was inches from one occupied by an older man, who was bundled in layers, drinking wine and listening in on our conversation until he could hold his tongue no longer. As a former teacher, he wanted to help explain. "There are the français de souche," he said - the "French of the soil," shorthand for the "real" French - and "then there are the French who are only French because they have the right papers." Pons politely pointed out that his own father was Alsatian and that he himself therefore hardly qualified as français de souche. "Eh, I myself am Breton," the man replied, in a friendly nonanswer. He had other opinions to share: The press had overblown the unity march, the students would see that their leaders did nothing and, by the way, that Charlie Hebdo? "It was a rag!" He had been reading a newspaper, which he left behind when he wished us good night and left. It was Présent, a far-right-wing publication. Its headline: "And Anyway - the Problem Really Is Islam!"

To help guide the party's new mayors, the National Front has published what it calls "The Little Practical Guide for Elected City Officials of the National Front." Its introduction states that hundreds of newly elected party officials will be serving as "indispensable conduits for the dissemination of our ideas, and the taking of power in 2017." The guide, which is 107 pages, discusses protocol, explains some basic accounting principles for the uninitiated and exhorts readers to be "smiling and agreeable" in public. Its message is to take courage: "Victory is so close!"

Under Le Pen, the National Front has revived a tradition of controlling its propaganda - with trainings, media coaching, brochures, talking points and economic analyses provided to volunteers and would-be candidates. One evening in Paris last month, Gilles Parmentier, a 21-year-old city councilman from a troubled Parisian suburb, led a training session for the National Front's youth group.

Parmentier started out by indirectly acknowledging a paradox of the National Front: The party is wildly popular and at the same time is so reviled that many of its supporters prefer to keep their allegiance secret. That can make it hard to recruit candidates for office.

"Not everyone wants to have their photo on posters all over town," said Parmentier, who is still a student. "So you could actually think about campaigning in the part of the neighborhood where you don't live - or in a different town. You can use your middle name. Or your maiden name. No one will make the connection, and you'll be safe, in regards to your job, your future and your friends."

In his V-neck sweater and with his hair neatly parted on one side, Parmentier looked as if he had stepped out of a brochure for some small American liberal-arts college. (He would be the one throwing a Frisbee on the green, not the student staring at a Bunsen burner.) He was addressing a crowd of about 30 or so young people, most of whom were male and listening closely. Moving on to the logistics of campaigning, he suggested that anyone interested in building support for the party should simply head to the neighborhoods "where people live in poverty, who live right next to immigrants, who live right next to this misery and poverty, to rampant immigration and Islam and radical fundamentalist Islam." Once you find those people, he advised, you introduce yourself as their savior: "Hello, I'm your National Front representative. I represent Marine and her values. I'm going to help you fix your problems."

Because he was there specifically to coach young party members, he tried to make the case that inexperience need not be equated with incompetence. The National Front has always put young people's careers on the fast track, he pointed out - just look at Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Marine's niece, who was voted into the National Assembly at 22. And that guy in Fréjus, what was his name again?

"Rachline!" someone called out.

Parmentier had not quite mastered Rachline's gift for drawing the line at just the right place, with just the right smile or euphemism. In criticizing his own town's mayor, with whom he has often feuded, Parmentier described him as having the qualities "of a little king, of a petty tyrant," then, under his breath, "of a Moroccan, or Tunisian, or whatever." He sometimes drifted off midsentence, nervous, only to come bounding back with a show of machismo. He warned his young friends that once you were voted into office, you had to conduct yourself in a manner that reflected well on the party. If some jerk is messing with you, you can't just break his face, he said, though his language was more crass than that.

For more visible positions, Le Pen personally "approves or vetoes every significant candidate in the areas where the National Front has a shot of winning," according to Abel Mestre, who covers the National Front for Le Monde. A team of young volunteers working under Florian Philippot, a party vice president, devotes considerable attention to scanning various candidates' Facebook pages, looking for anything that will embarrass the party or embroil the candidate in legal problems. In mid-December, for example, a departmental candidate in southwestern France reportedly posted on her Facebook page: "Your grandparents fought so you would not become German. . . . fight so you don't become Arab." Party officials claimed that the candidate's site had been hacked.

Like Parmentier, the young people in attendance at the National Front's youth event were almost uniformly earnest, and some showed more polish than their speaker. "We are all patriots here," a young man wearing a tie told me, straightening up as he said it. A young woman said the party's family values appealed to her; a young man said he was tired of answering to Washington and Brussels.

After half an hour, the audience started getting restless. The conversation took one last turn, to a familiar National Front target - local subsidies, often deemed wasteful, to various organizations. "Which association gobbles up the most money?" a young man asked. Another attendee couldn't resist - he called out the name of a Jewish one. The audience laughed.

Two days before I met Marine Le Pen, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, took a call from a Russian reporter and agreed, when asked, that the Paris attacks had "the look of something the Secret Service would have staged." His comments circulated widely in the news media, and Marine Le Pen quickly went out of her way to dismiss them as a "woolly conspiracy theory."

I wondered how those moments played out within the family. Did she ever pick up the phone to let him know that he was meddling with her campaign strategy? "I've stopped doing that," she told me in her office in Nanterre. "He just says, 'I'm a free man. I'll say what I want.' "

Tall, blond, stately and brisk, Le Pen has little of her father's effortless showmanship. Instead, she offers relatability. At 46, she is twice-divorced and a mother of three, her hair held back with a bright plastic clip; a hot-pink e-cigarette sits on her desk. The National Front has never attracted more female voters.

Jean-Marie Le Pen's presidential ambitions were always considered more of a spectacle than a serious prospect. His history of unnerving extreme-right alliances and outrageous provocations was too extensive. Most infamously, he characterized the gas chambers of Nazi Germany as a "detail of World War II history." (Mention his name, and many French will just say, "Detail, detail," with a shake of the head.) Patients who were H.I.V.-positive, he once proposed, should be isolated in an "AIDS-atorium." In 2002, he stunned the country by winning enough votes in the first round of the presidential election to make it to the second; the country, seemingly appalled by its own conduct, then voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, whose margin of victory was about 65 points.

Although Marine Le Pen would most likely fare better than her father, that second round remains a major, if not unmovable, obstacle standing between the National Front and the presidency. Even if she makes it to the runoff, whichever mainstream party loses the first round would almost inevitably direct its voters to support the other mainstream party, an alliance called the "republican front."

Le Pen is nonetheless charging full tilt at the 2017 campaign. She recently added to her team Sébastien Chenu, a former national secretary in France's center-right party (the U.M.P.) and the founder of a gay rights organization that supports same-sex marriage, which the National Front officially opposes. Factions in the party objected to Chenu, loudly. "Yes, there were people who said, 'Another gay,' " Chenu told me. (Philippot, who serves as Le Pen's chief adviser, is also gay.) "But she told them: "This is not a religious sect, it's a political party. I want to win, and I need competent people.' "

In her office, Le Pen acknowledged that there was some dissent in her ranks. "There's always going to be a conservative element in the party," she said, "but I'm always trying to move the party forward a bit. A leader has to be a little avant-garde, to have vision. And to me, Sébastien represents the idea that anyone has a place at the National Front. We don't defend religious or ethnic interests - no, we defend the French. It's like McDonald's," she said, pleased to have landed on a simile that an American reporter would surely appreciate. "Come as you are."

At times, it seems that Le Pen can barely maintain discipline among the factions in her top leadership, much less among the thousands of local candidates posting on their Facebook accounts. In late January, Aymeric Chauprade, then the National Front's chief delegate to the European Union, uploaded a video of himself online saying that France was "at war with Muslims - not with all Muslims, but with Muslims." Invoking the language of the party of yore, he warned of a "fifth column" ready to undermine France from within. Le Pen fired him - she has tried to move away from her father's party's premonitions of civil war - but she could not fire her niece, the assemblywoman, who disseminated Chauprade's video via Twitter despite her aunt's clear directive, partywide, not to promote the delegate's words. Nor could she fire her father, who posted a photo of his daughter, in the middle of the Paris attacks, along with the slogan "Keep Calm and Vote Le Pen." "You have a father, too, right?" she said to me. "You know, you can disagree but still have mutual respect. It's not always easy though, especially in politics."

When her father founded the National Front in the 1970s, it was above all an anti-communist party. These days, in Le Pen's office, a framed poster leans against the wall; it shows a giant hand of God pointing down at a mass of small, suffering people under "Remember the Hungry" in Russian. "A Russian friend gave it to me," Le Pen said. "It's a vintage poster from the Russian Revolution." Le Pen, who vocally supports President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in his dispute with Ukraine, recently borrowed millions of dollars from a Russian bank - none of the French ones, she has complained, would lend her money.

One of Le Pen's most polarizing proposals is that France abandon the euro, which her critics argue would bring ruin to the economy - and it might be one of many reasons French banks would be disinclined to help her. It is also why many people consider her an unrealistic presidential candidate, whatever her poll numbers.

"At the end of the day," a French friend of mine in the finance world told me, "there are too many people with too much money who would do anything to make sure it doesn't happen. It can't happen."

Hénin-Beaumont, a former coal-mining town in the country's north, is one of those seemingly rare towns in France with no tourism to speak of. A large mall is a main employer, along with a factory that turns chicken into nuggets.

Its downtown is unexceptional - a pharmacy, a Domino's pizza, some small shops - but last year it drew crowds from all over the region at Christmastime. On the day a new Christmas market opened in the square, a Santa Claus rappelled down from the clock tower on the 90-year-old town hall, then threw out to the assembled children hundreds of bags filled with chocolates and other candy. There was a laser show; families and visitors skated on a temporary rink. People shopped to the sound of a Czech chorus singing carols in the square.

A month later, people were still talking about the festival, especially when the name of the new mayor, Steeve Briois, came up. "I can say nothing bad about him," said Mary-Renée Boutaleb, who is 58 and has lived in Hénin-Beaumont most of her adult life. "The Christmas market was beautiful." But it clearly pained her, at least a little, to admit it, given that Briois is a National Front mayor, the first in the town's history. Briois is one of five party vice presidents, a linchpin in an area crucial for Le Pen, according to James Shields, the author of "The Extreme Right in France" and a professor of French politics at Aston University.

"From where she is now, being president is unrealistic," Shields told me. "But winning a region would say to the parties on the mainstream right and left: 'Now we're a big player. Do you want us to take more regions from you next time?' Her strategy is to become irresistible as an alliance partner."

For decades, Hénin-Beaumont and the surrounding region voted left in huge numbers. The workers there, and in most of northern France, were considered the base of the Socialist Party, the ouvriers who regarded it as their protector and advocate. But last March, the town flipped. More than 50 percent of its voters backed Briois, who ran on a campaign promising tax relief and competence; the previous Socialist mayor was sentenced to four years in prison for abusing public funds and left the town deep in debt.

Boutaleb and her husband, Moussa, a retired welder, served coffee and small chocolates on a modern silver set when I visited their home in January. Moussa, a sturdy, proud man of 59 - he had been the president of the mosque in Hénin-Beaumont - looked down at his coffee. He adjusted his square saucer, lining it up with the edge of the table, the sound of the cup rattling quietly in his living room. And then he made a confession to his wife: Yes, he said, yes, he could imagine voting for Le Pen.

His wife was silent, but her face was a mask of reproach. She clearly received this news as a wound rather than as some difference of opinion. His statement hung in the air for a long, uncomfortable minute.

"Me, never," she said when the same question was put to her. "The party scares me. It scares me for my children."

Moussa's parents were French citizens born in Algeria when it was still a French department; his wife's family is French, going back many centuries. Mary-Renée knew some of the National Front deputies in town; she knew with total certainty, she said, that there were racists among them.

"There are racists in the P.S., too," Moussa said, referring to the Socialist Party. And France, he said, had had enough - enough immigration, enough bullying from the European Union, enough bad leadership. "It lost its luster," he said, rattling his spoon. "Its hands are tied." And although he said he was humane - he felt that people have a right to live better lives - even he, the child of Algerians, could not support how much immigration France allowed. "It makes it hard for the immigrants who are already here," he said.

Mary-Renée could understand why the party had picked up strength. "They take in anyone unhappy," she said, "the people who are worried about immigration, the unemployed, the racists." In one sense, it had something for everyone, she said, but it also had baggage she could not ignore.

When Briois started campaigning for the National Front as a teenager 27 years ago, he was an outcast - students called him a Nazi, teachers picked political fights with him in class. Once an object of contempt, he is now the wildly popular mayor, someone Moussa admires for his efficiency, his hard work, the LED lights he installed throughout town.

"He's very close to the people," Moussa said. "He's a humanist." Moussa recalled the days in the late 1990s when Briois campaigned heavily against the mosque, which Moussa and his colleagues were then trying to establish. "He was handing out fliers," he said. So what changed for Briois, for Moussa? After a long silence, Moussa answered: "The party changed."

After the attacks in Paris, Briois personally reached out to the mosque to let its members know that he stood with them and to invite them to a rally in town. The Socialist community refused to attend the mayor's rally - the Socialists held their own - but many Muslims did. That was the National Front that Moussa was seeing, not the young activist at the youth group or the mayor targeting a Muslim merchant in a town 200 miles away or the prominent public figures suggesting that millions of Muslims want to attack the French. Even if Le Pen is never elected president, the party could succeed another way: by pulling the right further right, mainstreaming and normalizing hostility toward anyone who does not conform to their notion of what it means to be French.

On a car ride to the train station, Moussa and I talked a little bit about his family. He and his wife had taken in a foster child, and he had an older son living in Lille, a major city nearby. He was proud of his son, who had a good job as an engineer at an energy company. But his son told his parents that ever since the attacks, he felt uncomfortable in France. Moussa sounded distracted as he was driving, but he kept talking. His son, he said, is dark-skinned like him. Now he was thinking about leaving the country altogether. He worried that he could "find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. France was his home, but anything could happen there.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The National Front's Post-Charlie Hebdo Moment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In St.-Raphaël, the rain started coming down in earnest as the crowd crammed into the small, windowless office. Rachline squeezed his way through, clutching forearms and giving one supporter after another a double kiss. The smell of cigarette smoke and wet wool filled the air; the office, hot, packed and bright, seemed just barely able to contain the ambition and emotion and pride of the moment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
France is a country, he said, of "enlightenment fundamentalists" demanding "the imposition of a whole identity."

It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls was criticized for describing the situation in ghettos like Clichy as "territorial, social, ethnic apartheid." But in the 10 years since rioting against the police and the state started here, and then spread nationwide, prompting promises of reform, life has worsened: more crime, more unemployment, more poverty, more alienation and now, more radicalization among Muslim youth.

The young people here scoff at the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, calling them "du pipeau," or hot air. They do not feel equal or fully free, and they have little sense of national solidarity.

As M'hammed Henniche, the head of the Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, which encompasses Clichy, said, "France is the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that's all it is, a declaration." Muslims, he said, feel freer to pray, eat, dress and live as they please in Britain, a monarchy, than in the French Republic.

As in other banlieues, as the heavily immigrant working-class suburbs are known, many young people here refused to comply with a state-mandated minute of silence for the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, whom they regard as having offended Islam.

A 14-year-old who would give his name only as Louins said angrily: "They don't respect us, and then during a minute of silence we're supposed to honor them? How can someone render homage to someone who doesn't respect us? We can't." He told his professor: "I'm going to make a minute of silence for Palestine." His friend Burak agreed, then added: "Stop the hypocrisy."

Mr. Valls and President François Hollande have announced new civics lessons in the public schools to reinforce republican values, including "laïcité," which translates roughly as secularism.

But if you are a Franco-Algerian stuck in the banlieues, Mr. Hussey said, with a fractured identity that is neither French nor Algerian, and you speak a bit of Arabic but not much, Islam can become "the only part of your identity that seems real."

He added, "It's great to feel you're a soldier in this larger battle, and what you're fighting is the big republic that imposes all these things on you" - unemployment, non-halal school menus, a ban on the full veil and minarets, a paucity of mosques and a pervasive sense of being "écarté," or rejected.

Mariam Cissé is deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois. Ten years ago, a cousin, Bouna Traoré, then 15, was one of the teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding from the police in a power substation, and whose deaths set off three weeks of rioting nationwide, with more than 9,000 cars burned, nearly 3,000 arrests and 56 police officers wounded.

Since the riots, "there are some new buildings and parks," said Ms. Cissé, 29. "But after that, what? What?"

The unemployment rate is 40 percent in Clichy, one of the poorest towns in France, with half the population under 25; there is a housing shortage, and there was no unemployment office here until last year, she said. It is only about 10 miles from central Paris, but there is no major road and still no mass transit station, despite a decade of promises.

"In no other developed country one sees towns so close but at the same time so far away," she said. "One can't continue to be 15 kilometers from Paris as the bird flies and yet need at least an hour and a half to reach the capital."

The separation and alienation of youth is inevitable, she suggested. Some French lawmakers said, "These youngsters no longer deserve to be French because they no longer adopt the values of the republic," she said.

"But France must assume its cosmopolitanism," she continued. "One can't welcome all sorts of people in the country without accepting their differences."

Gilles Kepel is the great political scientist of the banlieues, having written three books about them, most recently "Passion Française - The Voice of the Ghettos," as well as a report for the government. For him, the target of Islamic radicals is not France, per se, but Europe and its growing Muslim minorities. France, with the largest number of Muslims in Europe and the largest number of those traveling to Syria and Iraq for jihad, is an obvious focus.

But the effort to radicalize "nonetheless builds on things that are French," Mr. Kepel said. Not just poverty and exclusion, he said, but the offense taken "even by Muslims who drink wine" over the cartoons of Muhammed, and then the French Republic's full support for the cartoonists. As important, he said, is the unhealed wound of the French-Algerian war of independence and then of the Algerian war against Islamists.

Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist, said that the country needed a new clarity about its values. "We need a new enlightenment, to reinvent the republic," he said, to better "correspond to the diversity of France."

The fundamental question is "to accept and practice the values of the republic," Mr. Moïsi said. "But what does that mean? Respect for the other, giving reality to liberty, equality, fraternity. Freedom yes, but within limits. Equality, yes, but with limits to inequality in France. And fraternity is really missing."

Ms. Cissé, the deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois, put the problem simply: "France has trouble changing," she said.

"Integration, immigration - these are taboo, and at the heart of the program of the National Front and the republican right. Now they must become national issues," she said. "We have to confront these so-called problems so that one can travel as one wishes, practice our religion when and as we want, just like the others. And have a job, truly, because work is important."

Otherwise, she said, "France will be engulfed, in the years to come, in these same problems of 2005 and 2015."

Correction: February 9, 2015

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
France's Ideals, Forged in Revolution, Face a Modern Test

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
France is a country, he said, of "enlightenment fundamentalists" demanding "the imposition of a whole identity." It is in places like Clichy-sous-Bois, a tough and heavily immigrant Paris suburb, where the gap is most visible between the French Republic of civics lessons and daily life for the mostly Muslim population.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We owe the term "sociological imagination" to C. Wright Mills, a fundamental figure in sociology. He defined it as the intersection of history and biography. In his book by the same name, he writes:

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society

I couldn't help but think of Mills' words when I came across this video at Crooked Timber. In it, French children are asked to interpret technologies that, though just a few years out of date, pre-date their biography. While their guesses are creative and humorous, they also neatly demonstrate that, no matter how unique we are, we are also products of our time.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the version of this video that had English subtitles has been made private and we haven't been able to find another version. Here's a version without any subtitles:

Lisa Wade, PhD is a professor at Occidental College. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture, and a textbook about gender. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Intersection of Biography and History - Sociological Images

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We owe the term "sociological imagination" to C. Wright Mills, a fundamental figure in sociology. He defined it as the intersection of history and biography. In his book by the same name, he writes: The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society I couldn't help but think of Mills' words when I came across this video at Crooked Timber.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Les actes perpétrés les 7, 8 et 9 janvier nous ont confirmé, entre autres choses, que notre société réagissait très vite: sur le plan sécuritaire et politique, mais aussi sur le plan des symboles.

Le premier élan

Mercredi 7 janvier, quelques heures à peine après le drame, un nombre exponentiel d'internautes et de manifestants anonymes, mais aussi de personnalités publiques et bientôt de chefs d'Etat sont devenus "Charlie". En ajoutant sur leur profil numérique, sur une photo d'eux, le logo désormais culte aux lettres grisées sur fond noir, bricolé à la hâte par un graphiste dans les heures qui ont suivi la catastrophe.

En quelques heures, des millions de gens se sont retrouvés à exprimer leur tristesse et leur soutien aux victimes.

Et puis, dans les jours qui ont suivi, lorsque le deuil a succédé au deuil, "Je suis Charlie" a pu apporter leur soutien aux victimes du troisième djihadiste, de Montrouge à la porte de Vincennes. "Je suis Charlie" prenait alors appui sur le nom du journal pour désigner une communion de la tristesse et du refus. Tristesse pour les victimes et leurs proches, refus de ces meurtres.

Et l'unité nationale s'est craquelée un peu plus tard. Progressivement, dans le courant du week-end, puis plus franchement après la marche de soutien du dimanche 11 janvier. Le temps du deuil national, de la communion autour du signifiant "Je suis Charlie" était passé.

Les réseaux sociaux, comme toujours, allèrent plus vite en besogne. Dès samedi, Twitter enregistra sous le hashtag #jesuischarlie des messages de moins en moins unanimes. C'était le début de la concurrence victimaire ("d'autres méritent notre compassion"), des polémiques au sujet de la ligne éditoriale de Charlie (et des caricatures de Mahomet). Sur Facebook, le slogan devenait objet d'appropriation, de dérision. On déclinait l'icône en négatif ("Je ne suis pas Charlie" pour l'opposition frontale, "Je ne suis pas manipulable" pour ceux qui n'en pensaient pas moins), en sous-produits loufoques (" Je suis Chablis ", associé à l'hommage photo de Gérard Depardieu), en concurrence mémorielle ("Je suis GIGN", "Je suis Dieudo").

La tolérance? Quelle tolérance?

L'unanimisme a de nouveau fait place à un paysage complexe, à un espace public dans lequel les gens s'opposent. Ce fut la fin du deuil, le retour à une vie plus ordinaire où la parole se libère.

Et ce ne fut visiblement pas du goût de tout le monde. Sortant de la torpeur émotive où nous avait plongé le deuil, nous avons pris progressivement conscience qu'en quelques jours à peine s'était formé un nouveau culte -que nous appellerons le Charlisme, en reprenant l'expression incisive de Frédéric Lordon - et que cette dévotion toute nouvelle n'animait pas particulièrement ses nouveaux convertis d'un esprit de concorde, ni d'un excès de tolérance.

Faire du "Je suis Charlie" un serment d'allégeance à la communauté nationale... il faut ne jamais avoir feuilleté de sa vie le journal de Wolinski, de Cavanna et du Professeur Choron!

Sur les groupes Facebook dédiés au rap, riches de dizaines de milliers de membres, des jeunes fiers d'être "Charlie" rivalisaient dès lundi 12 janvier dans l'escalade verbale, avec celles et ceux -éternel petit jeu- qui les excitaient en insultant "leur" Charlie. Comme dans le roman de William Golding, Sa Majesté des mouches, on y apprenait visiblement le plaisir de la bataille rangée, la joie de fusionner avec ses semblables dans la détestation des adversaires.

A ce moment de votre lecture, je vous demande s'il vous plaît de goûter l'ironie: cette initiation à cogner sur ceux d'en face se faisait sous l'étendard d'un journal acharné à dénoncer les sectarismes de tous poils! Mais rassurons-nous. Sans doute étaient-ce les jeunes, peu au fait de l'"esprit Charlie", qui se montaient la tête autour de l'emballement médiatique.

Sur ce point, hélas, on fut très vite déçu: le lundi qui suivit, à la fin du journal de 13h de France 2, la journaliste politique Nathalie Saint-Cricq se fit la pythie du Charlisme. Son billet politique, c'est le moins qu'on puisse dire, annonçait la couleur:

"C'est justement ceux qui ne sont pas "Charlie" qu'il faut repérer, ceux qui, dans certains établissements scolaires ont refusé la minute de silence, ceux qui "balancent" sur les réseaux sociaux et ceux qui ne voient pas en quoi ce combat est le leur. Eh bien, ce sont eux que nous devons repérer, traiter, intégrer ou réintégrer dans la communauté nationale."

Faire du "Je suis Charlie" un serment d'allégeance à la communauté nationale... il faut ne jamais avoir feuilleté de sa vie le journal de Wolinski, de Cavanna et du Professeur Choron! Le dessinateur néerlandais Willem, ancien de sa rédaction, avait expliqué l'avant-veille dans un journal de son pays "vomir sur ceux qui, subitement, disent être nos amis". S'il désignait alors le pape, la reine Elizabeth, Vladimir Poutine ou encore Marine Le Pen, on l'imagine aujourd'hui un peu gêné par cette invitation à "repérer" les apostats, et par la communion religieuse de ces nombreux apôtres du Charlisme, animés par le zèle très violent des nouveaux convertis.

Tout est allé trop vite

Nous avons tous très vite réagi à ces drames. Trop vite, peut-être, sur certaines choses. Et c'est particulièrement visible sur la question du "que faire de notre sympathie pour les victimes?". Alors on s'est confit en dévotion, et le Charlisme a connu mercredi 14 janvier son premier pèlerinage.

Les éditeurs de Charlie Hebdo n'avaient prévu qu'un million d'exemplaires, les inconscients. Il faut les excuser, ils croyaient bêtement faire un journal, alors qu'ils étaient devenus sans le savoir des fabricants d'hostie! On avait envie de se pincer en voyant ces files soudaines devant les kiosques, si peu fréquentés hier encore. Et ces réponses désemparées, hébétées des marchands de journaux, devant la demande angoissée de ces centaines de clients. Alors maintenant on se bouscule pour acheter des journaux?

"Non, nous n'en avons plus. Non, nous ne prenons pas de commande. Non, nous ne savons pas s'il en reste."

A cet instant, j'ai eu envie de m'écrier:

Comme eux, je suis heureux de voir tant de gens retourner vers les kiosques. Comme eux, et un peu comme tout le monde, je sens quelque chose de forcé dans cette conversion massive. Tout cela est allé trop vite. On ne sait plus ce que "Je suis Charlie" veut dire.

Ils croyaient bêtement faire un journal, alors qu'ils étaient devenus sans le savoir des fabricants d'hostie!

Car le Charlisme qui a fait si vite irruption est la négation point par point de la passion libertaire dont Charlie Hebdo s'est toujours fait un carburant.

Le Charlisme menace les dissidents, exige une communion de façade, construit une religion d'Etat. Dès lundi, ce nouvel intégrisme s'est emparé de la machine judiciaire. En France, quand on veut, on juge très vite. Et on frappe fort. Quelques dizaines de minutes de comparution immédiate, et des lourdes peines de prison ferme pour des provocateurs ivres, ou à moitié fous, qui ont eu l'inconscience de se réjouir des massacres ou de se moquer des victimes. Très vite encore, la police sonne à l'aube chez le polémiste Dieudonné pour le placer en garde à vue. "Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly", avait-il posté sur son mur Facebook avant de l'effacer quelques minutes plus tard. Délectation de tous les complotistes, qui répètent depuis longtemps que la France est une dictature. De l'étranger, on observe la situation entre rigolade et inquiétude: Courrier International du 14 janvier, qui ne s'est pas autant vendue qu'il aurait dû, était plein de caricatures de nous, français, un peu moutons, déboussolés dans notre Charlisme patriote.

Méfions-nous du Charlisme. C'est une variante de la maladie qui a frappé les Etats-Unis au lendemain de leurs attentats à eux. C'est un piège inhérent aux crimes des 7, 8 et 9 janvier: inciter les Français à réagir bêtement, en miroir, nous faire faire le plus d'erreurs possibles et nous empêtrer dans nos contradictions. Al-Qaida vise ses ennemis dans leurs symboles les plus vulnérables, afin de les isoler et de les affaiblir. Le jour du 11 septembre 2001, de nombreux Sud-Américains furent gênés dans leur soutien aux Etats-Unis, parce que le "11 septembre" représentait pour eux l'impérialisme yankee, et plus précisément le rôle de la CIA dans le coup d'Etat chilien du 11 septembre 1973. Et ne parlons pas du World Trade Center, ce bâtiment que les contempteurs de la finance américaine exécraient depuis des années.

Il va falloir prendre le temps d'expliquer

Le "11-Septembre français", comme l'a titré Le Monde, a visé le "journal des caricatures". Nombre de musulmans, et sans doute aussi de juifs, de catholiques ou de sympathisants FN, pour ne citer que les principales cibles de Charlie, ne portaient pas le journal dans leur cœur: le Charlisme, c'est bien simple, ils n'y adhèrent pas. Dès lors, comment nous réconcilier?

On est en plein paradoxe, sans doute au moins souhaité par les commanditaires. Les terroristes ont emporté dans leur carnage les identités mêlées qui font la richesse de la France, puisque leurs victimes étaient portées par des convictions juives, musulmanes, athées et autres. Et pourtant, en réveillant nos crispations et nos non-dits, les djihadistes ont rendu difficile cette unité nationale dont nous avons, à cet instant, tellement besoin.

Les terroristes ont emporté dans leur carnage les identités mêlées qui font la richesse de la France

Nos responsables politiques ont flairé le piège et ont décrété l'unité nationale autour des victimes de ces attentats. Rendons hommage à leur sens des responsabilités. Et notons au passage qu'à faire trop vite, à récupérer trop ostensiblement le signifiant anarchiste et libertaire "Charlie" dans leurs hommage, le tableau a quelque chose de ridicule et d'inquiétant. Souder la nation autour des satiristes d'un "journal irresponsable", emprisonner pour blasphème aux défenseurs de la liberté d'expression... Tout est allé trop vite.

Il nous faudra un peu de temps pour nous retrouver, comprendre ce qui nous arrive.

Il faudra identifier les failles de notre système de sécurité et de renseignements, qui n'est pas parvenu à arraisonner ces fous sanguinaires avant qu'ils ne passent à l'acte.

Il faudra rappeler avec sérénité l'esprit de la loi du 29 juillet 1881 qui structure l'espace public français, et la raison pour laquelle nous tenons tant à son article 1:

"L'imprimerie et la librairie sont libres."

Peut-être faudra-t-il à l'occasion se saisir des débats qui agitent le clair-obscur de l'Internet. Expliquer la raison pour laquelle la loi française autorise la caricature des signes religieux, et punit la négation des crimes contre l'humanité.

Faire le constat lucide que la France voit se rouvrir, avec ces attentats, les blessures de son histoire coloniale.

Et rappeler dans le même temps que la liberté de la presse en France fut tout au long du XX e siècle un outil formidable pour éveiller les conscience à l'iniquité de la colonisation, et à la nécessité d'y mettre fin.

Se souvenir que l'on doit au génie de Grévy, Ferry et Constans -cosignataires de la loi de 1881- d'avoir créé cet outil d'émancipation propre à nous offrir une prise sur notre histoire. Et s'en servir pour ouvrir sans angélisme, dans la subtilité nécessaire aux moments difficiles, des espaces de discussions sur ce dont notre société a besoin pour passer cette étape.

Peut-être à ce prix-là conserverons-nous de cet élan qui nous a fait dire alors: "Je suis Charlie".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Les actes perpétrés les 7, 8 et 9 janvier nous ont confirmé, entre autres choses, que notre société réagissait très vite: sur le plan sécuritaire et politique, mais aussi sur le plan des symboles. Mercredi 7 janvier, quelques heures à peine après le drame, un nombre exponentiel d'internautes et de manifestants anonymes, mais aussi de personnalités publiques et bientôt de chefs d'Etat sont devenus "Charlie".