French lawmakers are largely downplaying the odds of civil war breaking out in France following two letters from retired military commanders and active-duty soldiers warning of such a conflict.
Two thousand active-duty soldiers backed a letter published Sunday claiming that the French government has “surrendered” to radical Islam. Last month, hundreds of retired military officers, including 20 former generals, signed on to an open letter warning of the increasing “disintegration and Islamization” of France.
The letters have become a flashpoint in a larger debate in France over the country’s response to Islamism and how to effectively deal with terrorist attacks in the country.
“[The letter] is a waste of time and offers no solution,” Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday, according to Politico Europe. “There is no laissez-faire in France. Yes, there is a political Islamism that is trying to break up the country, and we are fighting it.”
Le Maire accused the authors of the Sunday letter, published in the right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles, of using rhetoric of the far-right.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, who leads the France Unbowed party, called the letters by current and former servicemen “mutinous and cowardly.”
MP Jean-Michel Fauvergue, a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s party La Republique En Marche, called the warnings of civil war “exaggerated,” though admitted that much of the trends and dangers the military men identified are real.
“We are in a time of a loss of values,” Fauvergue said. “These soldiers are talking about insecurity, repeated attacks against institutions such as the police, the army, and it’s the reality, it’s a reality that is acknowledged by politicians.”
National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, who is planning to challenge Macron in 2022, sided with the letter authors, echoing the warning to Macron that he risked civil war by taking too-lax an approach to Islamism. While speaking at a campaign event on Monday, Le Pen called the Sunday letter “a lucid” look at the state of France, according to Bloomberg.
The Sunday letter compared France’s current approach to Islamism today to France’s approach to the Nazis in 1940, when France abandoned, “without reacting, entire neighborhoods of our country to the law of the strongest.”
“Many of us have suffered enemy fire,” the soldiers, who claim to be veterans of operations in Africa and Afghanistan, wrote, according to a translation of the letter by the Italian journalist Giulio Meotti. “Many have offered their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you are making concessions on our soil. We have seen the abandoned suburbs with our own eyes. We have endured attempts to exploit religious communities, for which France means nothing, is nothing but the object of sarcasm, contempt, and hatred. We marched on July 14th. We see communitarianism taking hold in the public space, in the public debate. We see the hatred of France and her story becoming the norm.”