Teaching schoolchildren about French greatness can’t save France...
ARTHUR RIMBAUD’S great 1871 poem, “Morning of Drunkenness,” concludes with a famous prediction: “Now is the time of the assassins.” The poet’s ecstatic vision may have been off by 150 years, but, between them, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, the perpetrators of the mass murders in Paris at Charlie Hebdo’s offices and at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes in January of this year, appear to have helped usher in a real time of the assassins, one whose end is nowhere in sight. For the trio had their own ecstatic, murderous visions, ones for which neither the institutions of the French state nor the various strata of French civil society (to the extent they are separable in a France that remains corporatist in a way most of its EU partners do not) seem to have any antidote.