"The Republic is in danger." With these sobering words in an open letter published on Tuesday, November 7 on Le Figaro's website, the president of France's Assemblée Nationale, Yaël Braun-Pivet, and her counterpart from the Sénat, Gérard Larcher, called for a "grand march" against anti-Semitism this Sunday.
One month to the day after Hamas's terrorist attack, which provoked Israel's retaliation, these representatives of the French Parliament have implicitly admitted that the conflict has had repercussions on French soil. In four weeks, write the presidents of the two chambers, "more than 1,000 [anti-Semitic] events have been recorded, twice as many as during all of 2022. On our soil, this translates into insults, threats and violence against our compatriots of the Jewish faith. Fear is taking hold and threatens to become commonplace if we don't react." Calling on "all republicans" to unite, they add: "More than a reaction, more than words: a general mobilization is essential."
This plea to awaken people's consciences was decided over a lunch between Braun-Pivet and Larcher at the Assemblée président's official residence on Monday, November 6. Both expressed their deep shock at the recent surge in acts reminiscent of the darkest hours of history.
No contact was made with the Socialist Party's (PS) leader, Olivier Faure, who just two days earlier had issued a call "to all political forces" for a rally against anti-Semitism, without setting a date. Very quickly, controversy flared up on the left, because Faure had not initially ruled out the participation of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party.
Braun-Pivet and Larcher's initiative delighted Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF). "Symbolically, it was important for the call to come from institutions of the Republic," he told Le Monde, adding he was dreaming of a massive mobilization. A huge human tide, like the one on May 14, 1990, when 200,000 French people, including President François Mitterrand, marched in Paris after the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras, in the south of France. Or like on January 11, 2015, after the terrorist attack on Charlie Hedbo and the hostage crisis at the Hyper Cacher (a kosher supermarket), when over 1 million people rose up against the barbarity of terrorism, bringing together not only Socialist President François Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, but also the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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