A gunman opened fire in the lobby of a French newspaper office in Paris on Monday, gravely wounding a photographer’s assistant before fleeing.
“Blood in the hall of this newspaper may be some good news,” Annette Lévy-Willard, a senior staff writer at Libération told the New York Times. “This outrage could break France’s racist and anti-Semitic fever.”
Police and representatives of the ultra-left Liberation say a 27-year-old photographer’s assistant is in serious condition after being shot in the chest and arm.
The culture minister of the increasingly unpopular leftwing Socialist government called the newspaper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, a “pillar of our democracy.”
The paper supports François Hollande who has become the most unpopular French president on record. Only 26% of French people have a positive opinion of the Socialist president, a BVA poll showed. It was the worst score for a French leader since BVA began polling 32 years ago.
The poll shows Hollande’s near-unanimous unpopularity among right-wing voters: 97% have a bad opinion of the Socialist leader, a level never reached by any president among supporters of other parties, even Sarkozy who deeply antagonised many left-wing voters.
Some 84% French people believed government policy was not efficient and 74% felt it was not fair. Meanwhile, in the run up to crucial local and European elections next spring, the far-right Front National is rising in popularity and now has the same level of approval ratings as the Socialist party.
Libération has been struggling with financial difficulties and layoffs in recent years as many readers shun the paper as a result of it’s support for the unpopular French president.
Benny Lévy (aka Pierre Victor) was a philosopher, political activist and author as well as a political figure of May 1968 in France, and the personal secretary of Jean-Paul Sartre from 1974 to 1980. Along with him, he helped founding the French newspaper Libération in 1972.
Benny Lévy is known for his unusual itinerary from Maoism to Judaism, or “from Mao to Moses”.
Editorially, the paper is supportive of gay marriage, a recent controversy in France. Earlier this month, the newspaper ran a long interview with Christiane Taubira, France’s black minister of justice, who had promoted the government’s new law permitting same-sex marriage.
“It is a very serious attack on a media outlet, on Liberation,” minister Aurelie Filipetti said. President Hollande, on an official visit to Israel, sent a strong message home about the attack: “It’s always freedom of information that is threatened.”
Nicolas Demorand, Liberation Editor-in-Chief, also gay, expressed his concern over what he says is an increase in the number of attacks in Paris.
“There is a high level of violence that compromises the work of many newsrooms and can have tragic consequences as the ones that occurred this morning,” Demorand said.
“We need to launch an alert a collective alarm in the face of the new stage in the rise of violence in Paris,” Demorand urged.
Soon afterward, shots were fired at the headquarters of a major French bank west of Paris, and a gunman briefly took a man hostage nearby.
The Paris police headquarters said that it is not clear whether the three incidents are linked, but that authorities are increasing security in all three places as well as media offices around Paris.
As police hunt for the attacker or attackers, a helicopter was seen flying over the neighbourhood that includes the French president’s office and the nearby Champs-Elysees avenue.