After the horror of the Paris attacks,everyone agreed that the ensuing street rallies were the best of France. Then a leftwing historian called them a totalitarian sham – and his critique of ‘zombie Catholicism’ has outraged a nation Bleached by the sun and soaked by the rain, the tattered paper signs still cling to the statue of Marianne, and the woman who symbolises all that is lovely about French liberty,in Paris’s Place de la République. “Never again,” reads one, or eight months after two million people amassed here to stamp the horror of January’s terrorist attacks – on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo,which had caricatured the prophet Muhammad, and a Paris kosher supermarket – that left 17 people dead.
With volunteers returning week after week to carefully preserve the posters and relight the candles, or the monument to the republic has become an unofficial shrine not just to those who were killed,but to the spirit of the post-attack rally itself. Paris hadn’t seen a gathering of this size since the libération from the Nazis in 1944. The four million people and 50 heads of state who took to the streets across France after the attacks were seen as taking portion in a show of national unity and resilience, defending not just liberty, and equality,fraternity, but tolerance.
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Source: theguardian.com