Je me mets ça de côté. Je me souviens, en effet, que ça a été le bordel à un moment pour savoir ce que l'opinion de la rue post-Charlie pensait et comment l'acheter pour dire nawak.

Le 11 janvier 2015, les attentats contre Charlie Hebdo et l’Hyper Casher ont suscité les plus grandes manifestations que la France ait connues depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Assez vite cependant le profil et les motivations des manifestants ont été mis en cause. S’agissait-il de “bons citoyens” marchant pour la défense de la liberté d’expression, de la tolérance et des valeurs républicaines? Ou n’exprimaient-ils pas plutôt leur rejet de l’Islam et des Musulmans, comme le suggérait le démographe Emmanuel Todd (2015)? Pour répondre à ces questions cet article, inscrit dans la sociologie des mouvements sociaux, s’appuie sur les données d’une enquête nationale par sondage conduite deux mois après les attentats. Les résultats montrent, d’abord, que les manifestants pro “Charlie” avaient le profil habituel des manifestants mobilisés pour des causes post-matérialistes : surreprésentation des citoyens jeunes, urbains, instruits, de gauche et tolérants. Ensuite ils soulignent l’importance du facteur religieux. Les Musulmans ont été moins enclins à dire qu’ils avaient manifesté, et les Catholiques pratiquants à dire qu’ils auraient souhaité le faire.

[...] Few weeks later, however, other interpretations of the rallies took over. For instance, in a widely publicized and polemic essay titled “Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d’une crise religieuse” [Who is Charlie? Sociology of a religious crisis] (Todd, 2015), the demographer Emmanuel Todd, presented the rallies as an “imposture”, “a collective hysteria”, a “totalitarian flash”. According to him, the rallies did not represent the society at large, but mostly gathered an ageing, white, upper middle class and, above all, catholic France. In his analysis, the participants of the rallies are described as “catholic zombies”, who are not necessary churchgoers but who are impregnated by the authoritarian and hierarchical values of the faith they were brought up in. According to him, these participants actually did not defend freedom of expression against fundamentalism, they rather expressed the right to bash a minority religion, Islam

[...]

[...] Todd’s essay was based on the geography of the rallies, extrapolating from the social and religious structures and political traditions of the cities which had the largest numbers of protesters, with the risks of ecological fallacy it entails (Robinson, 1950)1. We argue, first, that survey data are more adapted to the exploration of individual characteristics than aggregated data; and second, that protests and street demonstrations cannot be fully understood without taking into account sociological and psychological theoretical existing models. [...]

[...]

The general atmosphere of the post Charlie rallies was legitimized by all state authorities and institutions, and sponsored by the major parties and associations. Thus, it was seen very positively by mainstream media, and was associated with compassion, tolerance and solidarity in the public (Truc, 2016). Indeed, republican fraternity and freedom of expression were the main arguments put forward to encourage participation in the rallie

[...] Reputations are not necessarily based on facts. Indeed, analysing 523 front-pages of Charlie Hebdo from 2005 to 2015, Mignot and Goffette show that two thirds of them dealt with politics, only seven percent with religion, mainly Catholicism. Only 1.3 percent targeted Islam specifically. Nevertheless, because the journal reproduced one of the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons, in 2006, and once again in 2011, it had the reputation of an islamophobic and blasphemous newspaper. Before the January 7 attack, it was brought to court several times by Catholic fundamentalist and Islamic associations and its journalists have been regularly threatened [...] This could make religious Muslims as well as Catholics quite ambivalent toward the rallies for Charlie, and place them at odds with the general atmosphere. This should even more be the case for French Muslims, who may not only be reluctant to take sides with a journal which caricatures the Prophet, but who may also fear to be pointed at and stigmatized for the attacks. Such situations of cognitive dissonance may hinder the expression of pro-Charlie sentiments in these two groups

Oui, enfin les unes ne font pas tout, y'a aussi le contenu, hein. ;)

[...]

[...] Indeed, if 30 percent of the respondents said they participated it would mean over ten million people marched on January 10–11, almost three times the estimated number given by the police and the media.

Haha, le conformisme social après coup. Mignon. :)

[...]

[...] Respondents who feel close to the radical left (“Left Front”, and Trotskyist parties) were by far the more supportive of the Charlie demonstrations, even more than the supporters of the mainstream left (“Socialist Party”, in power). At the other end of the spectrum, the radical right supporters (“National Front”) were clearly the most opposed: only 17 percent said they participated to the rallies, while 46 percent did not and did not wish too. The mainstream right supporters (“Union for a Popular Movement”, now labelled “The republicans”) were a little less reluctant than those of the radical right (22 percent took part, 40 percent did not and did not wish to), but clearly less supportive than their party leaders, especially their president Nicolas Sarkozy.

[...]

[...] The data contradict the idea that the real motivation of the participants to the Charlie rallies was Islam bashing and anti immigrant sentiment. There were prejudiced people among those who participated to the rallies, but as expected, the declared rates of participation were the highest among the most tolerant respondents. In the two first most prejudiced quintiles the rate of declared participation is 20 percent, but in the last and least prejudiced one it is 46 percent, with 28 percent saying they wished they could have taken part. [...] Those who had negative attitudes toward Muslims and Islam participated less than those who had no particular animosity towards this religion and its followers. The only intriguing result is the very slight drop of declared participation in the fifth quintile (from 37.5 to 36.5 percent), the most tolerant towards Islam.

Catholics represented 57 percent of the sample. Among them, regularly practicing Catholics are 10 percent (N = 57), occasional practicing are 21 percent (N = 125), the rest are non practicing. Respondents of Muslim faith represented 5 percent of the sample (N = 49). Among them, a little less than half are practicing Muslims.

[...]

[...] Recent comparative research shows a greater reluctance of women for collective and possibly confrontational forms of political participation in general (rallies, meetings), and conversely a stronger inclination to private oriented forms such as boycotts, boycotts or petitions [...]

Answers to opinion polls depend on the time of the survey, the mode of data collection, the sampling methods, the questions asked, the way they are framed, etc. Our data has its limitations. For instance, it does not include indicators of emotions, that played a central part in the reactions to the Charlie attacks [...]

Last, one should note that this tolerant mood, after the bloody attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher, was not only a characteristic of those who took part in the rallies, it was shared by French society at large. One can see it on the Longitudinal Index of Tolerance constructed by Vincent Tiberj (Mayer, Michelat, Tiberj & Vitale, 2015 and 2016). Based on 69 series of questions asked in the CNCDH annual Barometer on racism (the survey used for this study) since 1990, the index, which varies from 0 (if every respondent gave the prejudiced answer to all the questions) to 100 (if every respondent gave the tolerant answer to every question), summarizes the ups and downs of tolerance toward minorities and migrants (for a contextualisation see Tiberj, 2008; also Cohu, Maisonneuve, & Testé, 2016). After the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher gunning, far from declining, the index gained 2 points (between the November 2014 and a special post Charlie March 2015 survey), and after the terrorist attacks of the Bataclan and the Stade de France, on 13 November 2015, 5 points (January 2016 survey). In other words, terrorism does not necessarily breed intolerance. [...]

Via je ne sais plus qui. :(