On the morning of 8 June this year, Henri d’Anselme heard a commotion in an Annecy playground. The 24-year-old Frenchman then saw something horrific: a man with a knife stabbing babies and toddlers in front of their hysterical mothers. D’Anselme did what we all like to imagine we would have done in similar circumstances: he intervened.
Footage captured on mobile phones showed d’Anselme chasing the assailant, distracting him until the police arrived. It should have been a straightforward story for the media: a striking demonstration of good confronting evil, and that was the narrative chosen by most newspapers and broadcasters. But not all. There was a problem for one or two left-wing newspapers, not to mention the bitter-and-twisted brigade on social media: d’Anselme’s religion.
D’Anselme is a practising Catholic, a man proud of his faith, who was in Annecy as part of a peregrination across France. Asked by a television reporter what had inspired him to act, d’Anselme referenced his Catholicism, describing it as “the greatness that nourishes me”. That was too much for one columnist, Daniel Schneidermann, who poured scorn on him the next day in the pages of Liberation.
Schneidermann was roundly criticised for his mockery, not just by politicians such as Éric Zemmour, leader of the right-wing Reconquest party, and Éric Ciotti, the head of the centre-right Republicans, but even by the CEO of his own newspaper, Denis Olivennes, who remarked: “I’m not sure I have a tenth of young Henri’s courage, and I’ve never done anything heroic… I have a deep admiration for him.”
Schneidermann later claimed that he wasn’t attacking d’Anselme but the TV channel on which he appeared. That was CNews, which is owned by Vincent Bolloré and was described by Schneidermann as a “Catho-tradi [traditional Catholic] channel”. Bolloré also owns the radio station Europe 1 and recently acquired Le Journal du Dimanche, France’s only dedicated Sunday broadsheet.
This has upset many within the Republic’s self-styled “cultural elite”, not because a wealthy man now owns a newspaper to go with his two broadcast stations, but rather because he is, as one of his media rivals recently described him, a “conservative Catholic”. There are Jewish and Muslim tycoons in France but none of the chattering classes would ever dare define them by their religion.
But elements of the bourgeois left have always loathed Catholics. The Revolution of 1789 was hijacked by this milieu and then transformed into a cultural revolution that sought – in modern parlance – to “cancel” Catholicism. It destroyed its churches and statues and even replaced the Gregorian calendar with a new Republican one; under Robespierre, it then began to exterminate Catholics themselves. In the Vendée region, around 200,000 men, women and children were massacred: crimes against humanity that some on the left still refuse to acknowledge.
On the other hand, the author of what some historians in France describe as a genocide is still revered by some on the far left. In July, two MPs from La France Insoumise travelled to Robespierre’s home city of Arras to mark the 229th anniversary of his death. Imagine the outcry if a couple of German MPs held a service of commemoration in Berlin to mark the death of Hitler.
Catholics in France are well aware of the disdain in which they are held. This contempt manifests itself in different ways. In 2021, there were 1,659 incidents categorised by the French authorities as anti-religious: 857 were labelled anti-Christian, 589 were anti-Semitic and 213 were logged as anti-Muslim. These acts range from verbal abuse to attacks on religious buildings. When Notre-Dame de Paris was consumed by fire in 2019, some on the left joked, “The only church that illuminates is the church that burns.”
Given this animus, it is not surprising that French Catholics increasingly vote for parties that are on the right of the political spectrum. In the 2022 presidential election, 40 per cent of Catholics voted for one of the three right-wing nationalist candidates: Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen or Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.
For much of the 65-year history of the Fifth Republic, the natural home for French Catholics was the Republicans: the party of former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. The Republicans have lost their way in recent years, becoming a pale centrist imitation of the progressive Emmanuel Macron, but that is now changing.
The Republicans’ new leader is Éric Ciotti, an old-fashioned conservative, who was one of the first to call out the revival of the left’s anti-Catholicism, which he has dubbed “Cathophobia”. In a 2019 interview, Ciotti – an MP in Nice – said: “We need to stop rejecting, caricaturing and insulting all those who claim to have a Christian culture… being Catholic or Christian is not a stigma.”
But Catholicism is a stigma for some on the left, who regard d’Anselme not as a hero, but a man to be hated because of his religion.
Gavin Mortimer is a freelance journalist based in France
(Annecy’s residents gather to support the victims and their families in Annecy on June 11, 2023, following the attack by a Syrian refugee who stabbed six people, including four young children. | JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP via Getty Images)
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