The Eiffel Tower sparkled with all its lights. However, it was neither July 14 nor the opening of the Olympic Games. The Iron Lady shining in the night is the sign of the celebration. That of the transition to the year 2000 or the start of the Chinese New Year. It’s Johnny Halliday’s concert in June 2000 in front of 400,000 people. And on that fateful day of the Bataclan attacks, had she not put on her mourning clothes? On Monday, it shone with light to celebrate the inclusion of the right to abortion in the French Constitution. But was it well indicated?
We can welcome this inscription, the scope of which is otherwise quite relative, while wondering if the bravos and cheers were really in order. On November 26, 1974, it was far from the garlands and glitter that Simone Veil defended the legalization of abortion in a historic speech. She insisted on “the gravity of responsibilities” in the face of what she considered “one of the most difficult problems of our time”. And the Auschwitz survivor evokes her “deep feeling of humility in the face of the difficulty of the problem, as well as in the face of the magnitude of the resonances that it arouses in the most intimate of each French woman”.
Nothing to do with the flashy slogan which, 50 years later, flashed on the first floor of the tower: “ My body my choice »… obviously in English! A little sobriety would not have done any harm at this moment which was intended to be solemn. Was it necessary, as some deputies did, to paint France as a “beacon of human rights” to the sound of cocoricos? “To conquer without danger, we triumph without glory,” said Chimène’s father in The Cid, by Cornelius. Especially since, unlike in the United States, this right is contested by practically no one in France, as evidenced by the overwhelming vote of Congress where the few who resisted were mainly for reasons of constitutional law.
Few people wondered on this occasion whether women in France did not have more pressing problems. As evidenced by the murder judged last summer of Shaïna Hansye, a 15-year-old Muslim stabbed and burned alive in the town of Plateau Rouher, in Creil, in 2019. Her only fault: she was pregnant and wanted to keep the child. There was no question for the 17-year-old murderer that his mother would find out, because he was Muslim, he confided to a fellow inmate. Two years earlier, Shaïna had been the victim of a gang rape. She was only 13 years old then. This “says a lot about the place of women and sexuality in cities,” said his lawyer.
Closer to us, in 2021, it is Chahinez B. who was burned alive by her partner she met in Algeria five years earlier “because she wanted to live like a French woman”. This mother dreamed of “going out to cafes and wearing jeans”, wrote the Figaro. But her husband didn’t want to. We could also cite Sohane Benziane, found in a garbage room in Vitry-sur-Seine. In 2002, this sordid assassination gave rise to the creation of the association Neither Putes nor Submissives in the fight against the fate reserved for women in these ghettos in the process of Islamization. Since then, the association has fallen into obscurity, because this cause no longer interests today’s feminists.
However, all of this is widely documented. Thanks in particular to the recent testimonies collected by Olivia Jamont in Voices of the voiceless or to the book by Samira Bellil, who recounts her own journey In the hell of the turnings. In these neighborhoods, we no longer count the marriages arranged during trips to the countryside, the bans on going out, working and associating with those we nickname the “Gauls”. According to a vast survey by INED and INSEE, the wearing of the veil by Muslim women has increased by 55% in ten years in France. Now, the veil is only the tree that hides the forest. In a document published in October 2021, the former Secretary of State responsible for equality between women and men, Marlène Schiappa, estimated the number of women living in France who are victims of forced marriages at 200,000, and 125,000 victims of sexual mutilation and between 16,000 and 20,000 the number of polygamous families.
These subjects no longer interest only a tiny part of feminists and the media, today more concerned by so-called “inclusive” writing and its grammatical incongruities than by the fate of these millions of women left to their own devices. How many were moved by the abuse inflicted on the women raped and mutilated by Hamas torturers for the sole reason that they were Jewish women on October 7 in Israel? In a brand new report, two former presidents of the Council of French-speaking Women of Belgium, Viviane Teitelbaum and Sylvie Lausberg, reveal, with supporting figures, the “abysmal void” and the slow reaction of the Belgian media on this subject, and even from the feminist site Les grenades de la RTBF.
All this in the name of “intersectionality” and the “convergence of struggles” which encourage people to look away for fear of being called an Islamophobe. It’s not me who says it, but the magazine Franc-Stireur, whose latest issue describes a “feminism of varying indignation”. We will remember the deafening silence of feminists and mayor Henriette Reker after the wave of attacks involving asylum seekers on New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2016. “They are under the injunction to remain silent, under hardly, they say, of fueling racism,” the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter then reacted. A complacency which recalls that time when it was necessary to silence the crimes of communism in order not to play into the hands of fascism.
Not enough to make the Eiffel Tower sparkle.