At a small university in the city of Grenoble, an accusation of Islamophobia set off a wild kerfuffle and a media frenzy. Sound familiar?
On the morning of March 4, 2021, at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Grenoble, France—colloquially known as Sciences Po Grenoble—a group, probably of students, put up a poster on the side of the main building, a bright, modern structure with a view of the French Alps. The poster called for two professors, Vincent T. and Klaus Kinzler, to step down: “Fascists in Our Lecture Halls [T.] and Kinzler Resign. Islamophobia Kills.”
The poster was up for only a short while. But before it was removed, a student group took a picture of it and posted the photo online. Almost immediately, the media took note. The administration tried to keep a lid on things, but by March 5, the right-wing magazine Marianne had the story. The next day, the TV channel BFMTV ran an item about “two profs targeted” in Grenoble, an item that was in turn amplified by Caroline Fourest, a combative opinion journalist who made her name as a scourge of Islamism in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings and had more recently devoted her books and copious TV appearances to excoriating “wokeness.” Within days, the story had gone international. It was a time when accounts of campus wokeness, of out-of-control students and totalitarian social justice warriors, were at a premium, and the events in Grenoble seemed to fit the bill perfectly.
On March 8, the minister of the interior announced that the two professors singled out on the poster were under police protection. By March 9, Germany’s conservative daily Die Welt had published a lengthy interview with Kinzler, quickly supplying an English translation as well. By March 10, he was in Le Point. By March 12, he was speaking to Die Presse in Vienna. By March 13, an English version of Kinzler’s early TV appearance had been posted on the far-right “counter-jihad” blog Gates of Vienna. By March 23, the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle summed up the state of play as follows: “A German professor at a university in Grenoble, France, has become the target of a hate campaign for not wanting to compare antisemitism with Islamophobia.”
For this story, I spoke with several of the people involved in the affair. The fallout from the events of March 2021 clearly still cast its shadow over their lives. Some of those I reached out to didn’t respond, and among those who did, some didn’t want to be quoted. Everyone I spoke to reflected on events with evident exhaustion. For Sciences Po, which housed around 2,000 students and 150 staff, the row had created only bad outcomes: Almost immediately, the ministry commissioned two inspectors to write a report on what had happened. The report, released in April of the same year, recommended disciplining 17 students. Only one was suspended, according to The Times of London. François Jolivet, a member of President Emmanuel Macron’s party, demanded theatrically that the institution be placed under receivership. The conservative president of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the region where Grenoble is located, cut back public subsidies for the university.
For one of the two professors mentioned in the poster, Klaus Kinzler, a German instructor who did not respond to an interview request for this story, the March events became the starting point for a campaign against his own university. In December 2021, Kinzler, a voluble and young-looking sixtysomething, told an interviewer that Sciences Po had become “a political reeducation camp” marred by “wokeism.” The BBC and The Times reported on the renewed controversy. Kinzler charged that the university explicitly encouraged students to “insult, abuse, and defame teachers who have the audacity not to share their extremist opinions.” In response, the university suspended him. A few months later, Kinzler published a book about the ordeal. Its title: L’Islamogauchisme ne m’a pas tué. Islamoleftism failed to kill me.
This article is about that term, “islamogauchisme.” It is about the incident at Sciences Po Grenoble. “Islamogauchisme,” as a term, has a curious fate and a more curious function. And it depends on a very specific information environment in order to seem at all plausible. That information environment, and the values and hierarchies it seems to operate with, tell us everything about our age of anti-wokeness—an age in which public discourse has allowed personal smallness and pique to be recast as big principles, encouraging a kind of opportunism that goes on and on about “values,” but that in truth knows only one currency: attention.
But the Grenoble story, the story of “islamogauchisme,” is not, or is not just, about media. It is about government. “Our society has been far too permeable to currents of thought,” declared Jean-Michel Blanquer, then minister of national education, in an interview about the supposed scourge of Islamoleftism. From the beginning, the media hubbub in Grenoble met a government all too willing to exploit it—in ways that make you wonder what type of university (or society) France’s nominally centrist, even liberal, government envisions. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly liberal one.
The reason a reader in the United States should care about what really happened on and leading up to that March day in Grenoble is that the same media dynamics exist in the United States. And because the federal and state governments have been getting involved in much the same way. Over just the first few months of the second Trump administration, there have been extraordinary attacks on Columbia University, Harvard, and other institutions. Signs point plainly to the onslaught continuing.
Our age has become once again obsessed with campus stories, stories that are supposed to vouch for far more and far more impactful trends than they’d seem able to sustain at first glance. Those stories are about the campus, but are incapable of paying attention to it. They race at breakneck speed away from what it’s actually like at a university, where professionals sometimes behave professionally and sometimes don’t. They dive headfirst into relentlessly abstract generality. And they appear actively impatient with the day-to-day grind that is instruction and research.
The sociologist Éric Fassin describes this crackdown as “illiberal anti-intellectualism.” Under the guise of safeguarding the liberal university against tribalism, politicians from the political center and right are in truth trying to integrate the university into a new tribalism. Our institutions of higher education have been captured by the other tribe, they tell themselves, and thus it’s only fair for our tribe to take it back.
You can’t understand what happened in Grenoble in March 2021 without knowing what happened in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a modest, pretty outer suburb of Paris, in October 2020, even though the two events were largely unrelated on their face. When the story from Grenoble became public, the name Samuel Paty, a secondary school teacher who was murdered there, was never far.
In the fall of 2020, Paty had decided to teach a unit on free speech that included cartoons involving the prophet Muhammad. Parents and local leaders protested vociferously. On October 16, a Chechen Muslim refugee named Abdoullakh Anzorov followed Paty from school, then stabbed and beheaded the teacher. Minutes after the attack, he posted an image of Paty’s severed head to Twitter. A few moments later he was dead, shot by police. At the time of his murder, Paty was 47 years old.
What made the homicide such a crucible was that, while Anzorov may have committed the act alone, it did not come out of nowhere. There had been a social media campaign against the teacher; various groups had amplified the case. Someone had driven Anzorov to the school, where students pointed out Paty to his killer. The prosecutor of the case, Jean-François Ricard, saw a “direct causal link” between the online campaign and Anzorov’s brutal attack.
One of the accusations leveled against Paty was “Islamophobia”—the exact word used on the poster at Sciences Po. That’s the connection between the two events, the full extent of it, if we’re honest. The university, the anti-woke journalist Fourest wrote on Twitter shortly after the poster went up, had not just put a target on Kinzler’s back, it had “unleashed a mob against the right to question a word that has killed.”
In the newspapers’ telling as well, the events that led up to the poster calling for Kinzler’s resignation can be traced to fall 2020. At Sciences Po, Covid had moved almost all campus activity online, and everyone was cooped up at home. Which is when the announcement email arrived that, according to Klaus Kinzler’s book, started it all. As part of the university’s “Equality Week,” there would be an event on “Racism, Islamophobia, and Antisemitism.”
Kinzler decided to sign up for the group planning the event. Not because he believed in its mission, however. He felt that the title equated antisemitism and Islamophobia, though his real objection, it quickly emerged, was with the notion of Islamophobia in general. He didn’t think it existed. He thought the very word was dangerous.
Kinzler’s disagreement with the other organizers led to an increasingly heated exchange via email. There were several students on the thread. The only other faculty member initially on the email chain was Claire M., who studies Jews in the Muslim world. M. wrote to Kinzler that “the notion of Islamophobia is indeed contested in the field of partisan politics,” but pointed out that “this is not the case in scholarship.” It is, she added, “a heuristic concept, used in the social sciences, and as we are at a university it seems to me quite legitimate to use it.”
At some point, someone—probably Kinzler—looped in the political scientist Vincent T., who, like Kinzler himself, seemed to be less a specialist in any of the subjects at hand than a person with a strong opinion on Islamophobia. “I fully subscribe to Klaus’s salutary reflection,” T. wrote, “and I am dismayed to discover to what extent academics are immersed in militancy and ideology.” To speak of “Islamophobia” at this point would be to involve the Institut d’Études Politiques de Grenoble “in the fight led by Islamists.” Claire M. responded with a patient email listing scholarly articles and reputable journals to show that the notion of Islamophobia has a basis in scholarship. When Vincent T. replied, he looped in the director of the institute, political scientist Sabine Saurugger. This email was less an argument than a litany: “Charlie Hebdo was accused of Islamophobia. Samuel Paty was accused of being Islamophobic.”
Given how the story evolved later, it is important to emphasize that the disagreement was never about whether Kinzler did or did not believe that Islamophobia was real. Claire M. simply asked him to accept that many scholars studying the issue had come to the conclusion that Islamophobia was real, and that meant it could be used as the basis for an academic panel. Kinzler’s (and Vincent T.’s) position seemed to be that the word itself was violence, was subversion, was a win for the Islamists. Claire M., for her part, seemed mostly taken aback by the lack of collegiality and respect.
But behind it—at least in Kinzler’s and T.’s interjections—lay the charge that would define the affair, a charge that had gained currency in the wake of the Paty murder: that having a conversation about Islamophobia at Sciences Po was a sign that woke “militancy and ideology” were becoming dominant at the university, that, as T. wrote, the Sciences Po “would find itself in their”—meaning the Islamists’—“camp.” The charge was, in other words, “islamogauchisme.”
The fight in Grenoble was ostensibly all about academic freedom. But academic expertise didn’t seem to matter. Those who wanted to analyze were told they were being hysterical, while hysteria was lauded as analysis, so long as it was the right kind of hysteria.
“Islamogauchisme” entered the French vocabulary in 2002, with a book by Pierre-André Taguieff. Other early users of the term were the philosopher Pascal Bruckner and the journalist Caroline Fourest, whom we’ve already met, in her eager early dissemination of the Grenoble story. While there have been a few attempts to bring the term “Islamoleftism” into anglophone publications, it’s usually on blogs sporting eye-searingly garish fonts. The terms that frequently surround it when it does appear—“identity politics,” “wokeism,” “cancel culture”—have had a far more global career and impact.
Authentically French as the expression may be, Americans of a certain age may be able to detect the traces of a U.S. vintage. After all, we remember the way early war on terrorism-rhetoric positioned leftists—particularly academic leftists—as unwitting allies of jihadists. But “islamogauchisme” and similar constructions go further. They position leftism and Islamism as essentially linked projects.
Books and articles about “islamogauchisme” (fewer in number than books and articles about “wokisme,” but increasing in number) have a way of constructing deeply weird genealogies. Bruckner traces the genesis of this supposed alliance through British anti-colonial activists and neo-Trotskyist splinter groups in a way that feels learned, but esoteric. He even starts his historical rundown with a long quote from international assassin Carlos “The Jackal” Ramirez, whose writings are, admittedly, still huge in the undergraduate curriculum. Like the stateside work of “critical race theory”–hunter Christopher Rufo, who seems convinced that entire academic disciplines can be traced back to the influence of the Marxist feminist activist Angela Davis, these accounts shade into the conspiratorial without ever coming out and alleging a conspiracy.
The most important thing about this discourse may be what it does, not what it represents. It never has to say outright whether it thinks academics, lefty organizers, or, in this case, a student union are useful idiots, secret fifth columnists, or actively subverting “the West.” (Many still do, of course.) It turns all analysis into apologia, it renders careful study suspect rather than necessary. And, for all its loud caterwauling about free speech, it aims to chill speech by associating critical analysis of Western societies with the “radical evil” of “Islamism.”
One of the most interesting and troubling developments of the last 10 years—a phenomenon that started in Europe, but has now firmly established itself in the United States—is the attack on liberal democracy that presents itself as its defense. Conservatives in the United States long drew the distinction between a Christian moral order and the secular world. Europeans tended to draw on a different distinction: that between Christianity and Islam. When Europeans attacked the institutions of liberal democracy, they did so not by attacking their secularism, but by claiming to defend the institutions from capture by the Other. Whether it’s a bunch of kids camping on your university’s South Lawn to protest the war in Gaza, or the idea that wokeness has captured the faculty lounge, the message is the same: Our intellectuals, our young, our institutions are in more or less witting alliance with the Islamists. The only recourse is to attack those institutions.
By January 2021—two months before the poster went up, in other words—the dispute between the professors appeared to have died down. Through an ombudsperson, Claire M. had written to the university director. Both M. and the director agreed that Kinzler had a right to his opinions, but that he had violated his professional ethics in how he expressed them. Professor Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, director of the social science research center for which Claire M. worked, had written a letter affirming that there indeed was a scholarly consensus that Islamophobia was real, and that it was legitimate to organize events about it. The director of Sciences Po had demanded that Kinzler apologize for his unprofessional behavior in the email, and Kinzler had obliged—twice. That, in another world, might have been that.
However, the students were not part of this attempt at calming the waves, even though they’d been copied on the email thread, and had in fact made up a majority of its recipients at any given moment. Over the holidays, it seems, the students reached out to their own groups, above all the “Union Syndicale.”
French student unions are different from what North Americans would mean by that term. Unlike American graduate unions, they do not bargain collectively, but like them, they represent and advocate for the interests of their members. The Union Syndicale, one member told me slightly ironically, is not a real union, but it tries to do for students what the real unions do for workers.
On January 7, 2021, a long note about the email kerfuffle appeared on the Facebook page of a student group called “Sciences Po Grenoble en lutte.” It detailed statements made by Kinzler in the emails—statements denying Islamophobia existed and generally parroting far-right talking points—without identifying the instructor by name.
In February, members of the Union Syndicale reached out to other students to describe their classroom interactions with Klaus Kinzler and, above all, Vincent T. While not naming either instructor, the student union did name one of Vincent T.’s courses. Students accused the university’s administration of turning a blind eye to “Islamophobic” and “far-right” instructors and failing to protect students from them.
That, at least, is the timeline outlined in the inspector general’s report, which laid much of the blame for the escalation at the students’ doorstep. According to those I spoke with, what the timeline doesn’t make clear is that at some point either before or during the email quarrel, Klaus Kinzler had decided to teach a class unit on the topic of “cancel culture” for his third-year German students, and had chosen to include among the course’s texts, which he was in the custom of posting on his IEP website, a PDF of his email exchange with Claire M. and the students. Based on screenshots of the syllabus, which is no longer online, it appears he also added, as a reading, a “defense of the accused” (i.e., himself), even though in the emails he had done most of the accusing.
Whatever the case, over the course of January and February, interactions between the professor and the students escalated. Before long, he addressed his emails to “the little budding ayatollahs” and signed as “a genetic Nazi.” The report doesn’t make clear that most of the union’s communications were intended to be internal. The January 7 Facebook post that collected some of the more incendiary statements in the original exchange of emails was addressed to “the Sciences Po Grenoble Community” and meant to put pressure on the administration. And on February 22, the union posted on its Facebook page a request for “witnesses” to Islamophobic in-class behavior by T.
These details may seem like nitpicking, but against the backdrop of the Paty murder, the difference between a public and an internal social media post is significant. Paty’s killer was from a small city in Normandy, about 60 miles from the scene of the crime. He knew about Paty from the internet. Angry parents at the secondary school had spread the news, and incendiary claims had been posted on social media and circulated by the Facebook page of a mosque. To be clear: The internet and social media are not dangerous in and of themselves. They are dangerous insofar as they might connect a disturbed or radicalized individual like Abdoullakh Anzorov with a victim like Paty.
Throughout the inspector general’s report, however, the authors treat the digital nature of the student union’s efforts as problematic in itself. The fact that the emails Kinzler had put online were far more universally accessible than a Facebook post seemed to occasion no comparable worry on their part. It was the combination of youth and internet that worried them. Although Paty’s awful fate hung over everything that was to transpire in Grenoble, it’s worth noting that no one at Grenoble seemed to want to make the hubbub public. Until, that is, Kinzler started appearing in every medium that would have him.
Shortly after March 4, when the poster went up at Sciences Po, the instructor went on a massive media tour. LexisNexis lists more than 50 articles featuring his name for that month. By March 12, three former students of his took to the pages of Le Figaro in order to defend Kinzler’s academic freedom. The whole thing very quickly internationalized. In fact, only through this internationalization did the vocabulary around the entire affair solidify. Brits, Germans, and French people all had begun to worry about “wokeness,” and here was a perfect story to illustrate its supposed evils.
One year after the death of the secondary school teacher Samuel Paty, who was murdered in October 2020 for having shown cartoons involving the prophet Muhammad, mourners left flowers at a ceremony honoring him.
Some of the immediate responses to the poster of March 4 came from the usual suspects: far-right blogs and politicos. But it didn’t stay there. Within days, the French government was interested. Emmanuel Macron had swept into office in 2017 on a broadly centrist and liberal platform. As Macron’s fortunes, and those of his party, turned, observers began to notice a shift in the rhetorical winds. In 2020, in the midst of the global protests following the death of George Floyd, Macron complained about woke “social science theories” that were brought to France by ideological super-spreaders from the United States. Macron, who had long positioned himself as a bulwark against the far-right Rassemblement National party, started borrowing its buzzwords. With that came renewed scrutiny vis-à-vis the country’s universities—and a focus on “islamogauchisme.”
France has two ministries of education. There’s the Ministry of National Education and Youth, which in the relevant period was headed by Jean-Michel Blanquer, and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation, responsible for universities and research institutions, and headed then by Frédérique Vidal.
After the Paty murder, Blanquer had enthusiastically pushed the rhetoric of “islamogauchisme.” Soon he went on the hunt among the nation’s university professors for “the intellectual accomplices of the crime.” “The fish rots from the head,” he told one interviewer, adding that islamogauchisme “was causing havoc in our universities.” Were there tons of secret terrorists hiding in French faculty lounges? Not really. But the universities were encouraging “intellectual radicalism,” which “leads to the worst”—presumably crimes like the murder of Samuel Paty.
You’ll be forgiven if you find this account confusing. With Blanquer, things always lead to other things, resemble other things, things he then won’t fully spell out. As best I can discern, the suggestion was that French universities pave the way for Islamism by practicing identity politics. The French Republic is founded on universalism and laicism, the exclusion of religion from politics, and a rejection of a focus on particular identities or communities (the French term for identity politics is “communautarisme”). People studying ethnicity or researching racism, in other words, or affinity groups of students that are open only to women or trans people, are seen as promoting the fracture of society, and thus directly preparing the ground for Islamist terror.
But there is a strange contradiction in the way politicians like Blanquer wield universalism. For in defending universalism and laïcité as French values and achievements (and implicitly casting others as congenitally incapable of them), their opposition to identity politics can sound an awful lot like … French identity politics. “These are ideas that often come from elsewhere,” Blanquer said about communitarianism, “from a model of society that is not ours.” Something similar was in fact true of Klaus Kinzler: He had written in the email exchange that started it all that he “personally [had] no sympathy for Islam as a religion” and that he “much prefer[red] Christ.” It was left to the others on the email chain—the people who’d soon be tarred as cancel culture–crazed wokeists—to point out that this admission in fact violated the principle of laïcité.
It was a discourse riven with internal contradictions. Whenever you heard Blanquer talking in those days, you could sense that he sensed it, too. His statements had an improvisational quality, like a three-card monte player desperately shuffling his cards around. Still, the assertions got him on TV, more often and more extensively than the other French education minister, Frédérique Vidal, who appeared desperate to get a word in “islamogauchisme”-wise. On February 16, 2021, she announced “a review of all the research” to root out “islamogauchisme” and postcolonialism—to distinguish “that which is part of academic research and what is a matter of activism and opinion.” (In March 2023, Le Monde reported that no such survey ever took place.)
The government was, in other words, operating with an excellent theory in need of an actual event that it might explain. And Sciences Po Grenoble had the bad fortune of obliging. The government sprang into action with immense speed.
The resulting report, which came out just a month later, in April 2021, spread the blame around: oversensitive colleagues, lack of professionalism, an administration in over its head. But it saved most of its rhetorical powder for the student union. “The gravest fault in the chain of events which led to the events of March 4, are the accusations of Islamophobia and fascism” on social media. Again and again, faculty conduct is deemed “unprofessional”; but the student speech is deemed “violent.” You read that right: Addressing students as “little budding ayatollahs” is not violent, but calling someone a fascist is.
If this is so, someone forgot to tell Blanquer, minister of education (though, remember, not the one who called for the investigation). Blanquer had taken to a TV show to excoriate “things that resemble fascism.” His target had been a different student union, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France. The reason was even more negligible than the contretemps at Sciences Po: Apparently the union had held affinity group meetings that were open only to certain identities. The date was March 19, 2021.
It’s hard not to come away from the report with a sense that it holds the various protagonists of l’affaire Grenoble to vastly different standards. And it’s hard not to come away with a sense that that’s exactly the document’s point. There’s no question that everyone at Sciences Po could have benefited from dialing down the temperature on their rhetoric. But only certain forms of overheating were “violent”; others were covered by academic freedom. After all, the report seems certain, any overheated rhetoric on Kinzler’s part was merely in reaction to the rhetoric of Claire M. and the students.
People who present themselves as victims of cancel culture, political correctness, or here “Islamoleftism” often assume a pose of a babe in the woods. They step into controversy, they tell us, without meaning anything by it, and they are shocked by the outrage their innocent interjections elicit. Kinzler asks his readers to swallow more than the usual amount of this. The authors of the report fully obliged.
Reading through the email exchange that started it all, you do not get a sense of a well-meaning colleague guilelessly raising a point and being shouted down by fascist students. You get a distinct whiff of trolling. Kinzler had joined the email group because he didn’t believe Islamophobia was real; his arguments spoke to a steady diet of right-wing culture wars, mostly French and German varietals. And even in writing about the decision in his book, he can’t resist a weird joke about trans people that goes on for a page. Even by the standard of anti-P.C. outrage bait, Kinzler served up deeply hacky stuff.
Kinzler’s framing of the affair reveals a man fully immersed in the information environment that would later (briefly) make him a star. As he told Germany’s Die Welt shortly after the whole episode blew up, what happened to him was connected to a whole raft of other problems at French universities: “That science is confused with political activism,” for one. That “there’s no more debating or arguing because people might feel hurt.” You may agree or disagree with him on these points. But it’s fairly clear that this was a man primed, perhaps eager, for the kind of victimization narrative he now starred in.
But in some way, the Inspector General’s report leaves out an entire set of actors, for the simple reason that they commissioned the report. Several people who spoke with the commission told me they realized early on that the two bureaucrats had been sent to Grenoble to find what the minister wanted found, or to find what was least embarrassing to her. And they dutifully found fault among the one group their boss seemed most hostile to.
Between the lines, the report reveals that the ministry appeared to be actively distorting the case to its own ends. For instance, France’s interior minister announced on March 8 that he had contacted the two teachers. “Protective measures are being taken, work is being done with the prefect, with the police.” This early announcement became a big part of the story. The involvement of the police practically forced the comparison to the Paty case, and it escalated what was, at first blush, a bit of a trivial dustup into a crisis.
Something both the media stories and the ministry failed to mention: As early as March 8, the prefecture in Grenoble had offered police protection to several of the people at Sciences Po whose names had become public in connection with the poster—not just T. and Kinzler. Kinzler may have enthusiastically accepted the offer, writing in his book about getting whisked out of the Grenoble train station by police officers and being told to find a secret “safe space.” But professor Amilhat Szary, too, agreed to protection, even if she didn’t end up going on hikes with any police officers. A student I spoke to received an offer of protection (which I reviewed); he didn’t assent, he said, because he didn’t like the idea of having a cop follow him around.
And yet the minister seems to have deliberately created the impression that there were actual threats of violence that had exclusively or mostly been directed at Kinzler and T.
About those threats: They, too, were a big part of the ministry’s media campaign against Sciences Po. But here, too, the suggestion—both from media and from politicians—that Kinzler and T. were the main recipients of those threats turns out to be a distortion.
The first true targets were, in fact, the students. On March 7, the student union’s email account received a short email from an anonymous account. It concluded: “Beware, soon it will be your turn to be afraid.” Another, sent March 18, named two student representatives, calling him a “bastard” and her a “verminous bitch,” and suggested they “better start training for running by 2022. They’ll need it to make good time”—presumably referring to when far-right politicians Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour might become president of France. “We would need courts of the type Volksgerichtshof of the little mustachioed man,” meaning Hitler, “or military courts which existed under De Gaulle to judge the vermin leading these student mafia groups, with the guillotine in their sights.”
At some point, since journalists on the “islamogauchisme” beat seemed deeply interested in the story but equally allergic to actually talking to anyone at the university, the question turned to who had “given” the names of Kinzler and T. to the student union. They might have been able to learn that there was a PDF of the professors’ emails, put online by one of the men now claiming persecution. They did not. Instead, they decided that it was Amilhat Szary who had “leaked” the identities, never mind that her letters hadn’t mentioned anyone by name.
Fourest got the ball rolling on this line of accusation: “According to this,” she commented on an early news report on Twitter, “it was a teacher and the research laboratory ... who inveigled the students against these two professors.” On March 9, the CNews host Pascal Praud named the director of the laboratory on his show L’Heure des Pros. “This lady is an activist,” he explained, “who advances with the feeling of impunity,” accusing Amilhat Szary of “intellectual terrorism.”
For a group supposedly so concerned with the consequences that words can have, these journalists were shockingly uninterested in the obvious downstream effects of their own statements. On March 12, a post appeared on Facebook, where it seems to have attracted a fair bit of attention: “The Islamo-leftist Anne Laure Amilhat Szary is an instigator of the ‘fatwa’ launched against two professors at Sciences Po Grenoble! As she found it normal to distribute the professors’ photos, nothing will bother us if we distribute hers.” Again, she had not distributed them.
We know that there were threats against Amilhat Szary because in December 2022 10 individuals were charged with “harassment by means of a communication service” and “death threats.” A month later, they were convicted of the less dramatic charge of “cyber-harassment.” According to reporting from the trial, Amilhat Szary received “hundreds” of messages, including death threats, in the days after her name was made public. The French magazine Mediapart reproduced a few of the Facebook comments below her picture: “We are going to kill you!” “To the gallows!” “We must slit her throat!” are among the few printable ones. Again, remember that these torrents of abuse were raining down on Amilhat Szary while the inspector general was already composing a report accusing the student union of “violent rhetoric.” Somehow the threats of rape and guillotine didn’t make the cut.
So far, the only court-documented threats of violence in the entire Grenoble affair concern threats made not by “islamogauchistes” but by people claiming to oppose “islamogauchisme.” By contrast, just how many threats Kinzler and Vincent T. received is a bit of a mystery. If Kinzler received many such threats, they didn’t leave much of a trace in his book. Vincent T. filed a suit for defamation, but that suggests a different kind of message.
Still, it’s noticeable that media reports about threats were everywhere, while Kinzler describes his situation as follows: “1500 unread messages since the day before! Skimming through a few dozen, I see that they all express support for me.” The threats the media were referring to were most likely those on the original poster. The threat they were interested in was the one contained in the charge of fascism and “Islamophobia”; they seemed entirely uninterested in the torrent of threats precipitated by yelling about “islamogauchisme” in every newspaper and talk show.
The threat, by this line of reasoning, was saying that “Islamophobia kills,” as the students had done on their poster, a poster initially seen by a handful of people on an Alpine campus and among the social media followers of a student union. The idea that blasting an academic as an “islamogauchiste” on TV, radio, and newspapers might lead to messages like “Let her die with her ass stuffed with red rags and her mouth open,” as 73-year-old Alain B. said on Facebook about Amilhat Szary, did not seem to enter the equation.
This is where the story of Grenoble becomes the story of the university in the present age. The present age, meaning, in this case: a resurgent far right and a liberal, centrist establishment that seems increasingly ready to share the far right’s vocabulary and preoccupations. By December 2021, when the second round of stories about Sciences Po began to hit the international papers, the institute director told a French broadcaster that she was “stunned to discover the image of the IEP in the media.”
Grenoble was finding itself at the center of one of those campus stories that are effective, or maybe even meaningful, only when seen from the maximum possible distance. Within France, barely anyone seemed to bother to try to understand what had actually happened; and in the story’s international reception, that tendency was, if anything, heightened. Swiss newspapers could use the account to scare their readers about what might soon make its way to their own institutions of higher learning. German newspapers could combine it with a few American campus anecdotes to tell the tale of a woke virus that was threatening to spread to the Fatherland. It was that kind of international mythmaking that had led the Macron government to fixate on “islamogauchisme” in the first place. Now it was used to metabolize the events in Grenoble.
What Sciences Po experienced is something that has begun to characterize campus life in many Western countries. The strange magic by which a demand suddenly becomes a threat, while very real, very material threats somehow fail to register. The campus where an ineffectual administration barely contains the threat from within is apparently embodied by a group of undergraduates who have gotten hold of some paper and a canister of paint.
In the United States in 2023, seven university presidents were hauled before Congress to be yelled at by representatives of both parties for failing to discipline their students. Media and commentators seemed to desire nothing more than combat boots and truncheons raining down on blue-haired undergraduates (and in many places got exactly what they desired). The dynamics that enveloped the pretty campus in the Alps in 2021 have become an export item.
When U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York started her crusade against elite colleges, she mostly avoided talking about Islam. She instead described a university that, as she wrote in the New York Post, had been weakened by “decades of moral decay, intellectual laziness and dangerous far-left radical groupthink.” The notion that the West has weakened its institutions through relativism and thus primed them for takeover is widespread in conservative circles, but it is worth saying: Stefanik’s reasoning is “great replacement” logic applied to the university quad. During congressional hearings, Representative Kevin Kiley went further, and suggested, for instance, that Harvard’s Claudine Gay regarded “antisemites” as her “constituency.”
The idea that woke multiculturalists were in secret and intentional alliance with Muslim terrorism has become a favorite go-to of the second Trump administration. So has the idea that this supposed alliance never had to be substantiated by more than vibes. Each letter that goes out from the interagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism draws on a mishmash of actual complaints about antisemitism; conservative grievances over free speech, wokeness, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion”; and accusations of terrorism. In using Title VI claims and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and by linking these to “woke” or “postcolonial” theories, the administration has created the perfect cudgel to attack campus life. Its aim appears to be, in each instance, state control. In April, the Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard University. The top-line items—mandated appointment of conservative scholars, curtailing of faculty governance—got most of the attention. But in between all the other demands, the federal government expressed the opinion that the venerable university literally shields students “supportive of terrorism.”
Again and again, leaders were not responding to what was actually happening on local campuses—they were reacting to what they had been told had happened at faraway campuses. “Islamogauchisme” wasn’t explicitly invoked, but the idea that when students object to war crimes, “Hamas” is “taking over” the campus draws on the same connection. The charge of “islamogauchisme” is a rumor about the university, insubstantial, changeable, impossible to disprove. And it is destructive of the very institution it pretends to be so concerned about.
