Wednesday’s rally drew thousands, not the massive outpouring that took to the streets after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but not small, either. “We’re not Jewish, but we’re revolted by what happened,” a woman in the crowd named Mariethé Bernard told me. She said she hadn’t been at the march in 2006 after Ilan Halimi’s death, but she now regretted that. Nearby, Carolina Camacho Cruz, who is Mexican but has lived in Paris for 20 years, teared up when I asked her why she had come to the march. “It’s devastating to see this in 2018,” she told me. “The way she was killed, especially since she was Jewish.”

Politicians from across the spectrum attended, including the mayor of Paris. They were eager to show their solidarity. No matter where they stood on other hot issues in France—including immigration, multiculturalism, or laïcité, the country’s unique insistence on excluding religion from public life—in 2018, the murder of a Holocaust survivor is not something to take lightly. But their participation would prove complicated.

The umbrella organization of Jews of France, the CRIF, had said that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Front, founded by her Holocaust-denying father, Jean-Marie, wasn’t welcome, and neither was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist presidential contender whose critique of Israel has offended right-leaning Jews. Then, on the day of the march, Knoll’s son gave a television interview saying anyone was welcome to attend. Both Le Pen and Mélenchon showed up, but left early after they were booed.

I spotted Laurent Wauquiez, the new leader of the Républicans, whose rhetoric on immigrants had brought that center-right party closer to that of the National Front. At one point, an association of Jewish students started a somewhat feeble rendition of La Marseillaise, and journalists with cameras and microphones ran to film it. Along the route, I struck up a conversation with a 73-year-old man named Michel Ladovitch, who had come to the rally from a suburb of Paris. He was outraged by Knoll’s death, but didn’t like how politicians seemed to be exploiting the march. His father had voted Communist, he told me. “We had the image of the Red Army freeing the camps,” he said. He himself had once been a Trotskyist but now was more right-wing. “The truth is, there are too many immigrants,” he said.

The rally was a call to decry anti-Semitism, but it also ran up against a total aversion in France to what’s called communautarisme, which can loosely translate as American-style identity politics, in which members of ethnic or religious groups derive a strong part of their personal identity—and political clout—from their backgrounds and histories. The opposite of universalism. This is also why French intellectuals have been tying themselves in knots over how to deal with anti-Semitism. How do you call it what it is without asking for special treatment? The journalist and humanitarian interventionist Raphael Glucksmann wrote on Facebook that he was attending the march not because he was heeding the call of the CRIF, but “because millions of people, Jews and non-Jews, people who belong to one community or to none, feel the same anguish I do and feel in some way that they also lost their grandmother on March 23, 2018.” Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, from a liberal synagogue in Paris, tweeted: “I dream of a France that knows that someone killed a grandmother, and not just ‘mine.’ A nation that rises up to confront the horror and doesn’t send its condolences to a ‘community.’ #MyFranceHadaGrandmother.”