Repercussions from the Blast

By Stephen Smith

A huge march--and neofascist worries

It was the largest public demonstration in France since the 1968 strikes and the first time since the liberation of Paris in 1944 that all political parties and trade unions had united under a single banner. Filled with grief and revulsion, 150,000 people joined a solemn three-hour march through Paris to denounce racism and antiSemitism. The protest was in response to the terrorist bombing of a Paris synagogue two weeks ago. Four passers-by on the Rue Copernic were killed and nine others seriously wounded. The bomb exploded prematurely, while 600 worshipers were still in the midst of Sabbath services; had it gone off a few minutes later, police estimated, "a hundred people would have been killed."

The synagogue bombing struck a raw, guilt-strained nerve in France, which has a history of anti-Semitism stretching back to the Enlightenment and including a virulent flare-up during the Depression. Still painful are memories of the German Occupation, when the Vichy regime helped the Nazis send 85,000 Jews to death camps. Rue Copernic made Frenchmen wonder whether violence was once again becoming a factor in their political life, especially since it closely followed explosions set off by right-wing terrorists at the Bologna train station (84 dead, 160 injured) and Munich's Oktoberfest (13 dead, 215 injured). Conditions certainly seemed right for a fascist revival in Western Europe. With work hard to find, restive young people have been growing impatient with prevailing economic models, both capitalist (U.S.) and Communist (U.S.S.R.). For a simplistic few, fascism seems reassuringly regimented. In France and West Germany (though not so much in Spain and Italy), fascism and anti-Semitism tend to go hand in hand.

At midweek, French police announced that they had reconstructed a Suzuki motorbike on which the bomb presumably had been strapped; the owner, Alexander Panaryu, believed to be a Cypriot, was being sought for questioning. And by then, the unity and earnest soul searching that followed the tragedy had given way to confusion and recrimination.

President Valery Giscard d'Estaing was assailed for callously leaving Paris on a private weekend the night of the tragedy. Premier Raymond Barre made matters worse for the government when he carelessly told a television interviewer that the bomb was "aimed at Jews worshiping in a synagogue, but struck four innocent Frenchmen who crossed the Rue Copernic." Without meaning to, Barre had implied that the Jews inside were neither completely French nor completely innocent.

The French police, not having made a single important arrest in connection with 120 incidents since 1975, were also busy dodging charges that they were soft on rightist terrorism. Criticism had been building since August, when Italian authorities disclosed that a French police officer with well-known neo-Nazi connections had visited Italian ultrarightists in July, shortly before the Bologna blast. Jose Deltorn, a police union official, claimed last week that 30 members of the force were known neo-Nazis. He also charged that Interior Minister Christian Bonnet has had a list of the suspect policemen on his desk for weeks but has done nothing.

The Rue Copernic bombing was the clearest indication yet that neofascism and anti-Semitism were testing French society. In the week before the explosion, two synagogues and two Hebrew schools in Paris were machine-gunned. On the day of the huge protest march through Paris, thugs tried to bomb a Jewish-owned grocery store in Grenoble and bar in Marseille, and attacked dozens of Jewish stores and homes in the countryside. Says Historian Pascal Ory, a specialist on the French right: "The new generation does not have firsthand memories of the failure of Nazism. They can romanticize it today in a way that nobody could 20 years ago."

French neofascists have apparently had an impact way out of proportion to their numbers, which are quite few by most reckonings. The European Nationalist Union (F.N.E.) is the largest such group, with an estimated membership of only 200. Although uninterested in sophisticated political theory, neofascist street soldiers have found ideological shelter in the work of various writers, known collectively as the New Right, who support such Nazi notions as elitist education and genetic engineering. Warns Ory: "Every society produces marginal people ready to put on a uniform to mythify their delinquency. What is dangerous is a group of intellectuals who can gild the uniform and make it seem respectable."

Although there have been contacts between neofascist groups in most European countries, authorities do not believe they are coordinating their strategy. Still, their increasing boldness is cause for alarm. Right-wing assassins in Italy have killed 88 people so far this year and are now as feared as the leftist Red Brigades. Even before the Oktoberfest bombing, the small neo-Nazi movement in West Germany had stepped up its attacks on immigrant ghettos and Jewish memorials. In Spain, 18 people have been murdered by right-wing terrorists this year, and neo-fascist rallies have been attracting crowds of 20,000 to 30,000. French Historian Rene Remond says these signs are part of "a contagion of violence."

In France, at least, there is now a public mandate for tough measures against the neo-Nazis. The increasingly militant Jewish community will keep the political pressure at high pitch. If the police are unable to control the terrorists, the outcry for law-and-order will doubtlessly escalate. In that event, the authorities must take care not to be more authoritarian than the fascist fringe. "Can we keep cool?" Remond asks. "That is the wager." --By Stephen Smith. Reported by Sandra Burton and Alessandra Stanley/Paris

With reporting by Sandra Burton, Alessandra Stanley

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