French citizens paraded through Paris in their hundreds of thousands yesterday to proclaim national unity and freedom of expression.

However their march for decency was hijacked by a rogues’ gallery of 40 “world leaders” — perpetrators of imperialist wars, colonial occupiers, feudal despots and serial jailers of inconvenient journalists.

The 40 bigwigs took their place at the head of the march amid unprecedented security, waving to crowds assembled on the route.

Weeping relatives of the victims of the atrocities directed against satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket Hyper Cacher were also in the front ranks of the march.

They stood for a minute in silence before the huge demonstration moved off.

“Today, Paris is the capital of the world. Our entire country will rise up toward something better,” said President Francois Hollande.

“The terrorists want two things. They want to scare us and they want to divide us. We must do the opposite. We must stand up and we must stay united,” said Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

National Union of Journalists general secretary Michaelle Stanistreet and Irish secretary Seamus Dooley placed an NUJ poster outside the Charlie Hebdo offices and joined international journalist union delegations alongside their French comrades.

However, the contrast between those genuinely backing media freedom contrasted with the leading marchers.

Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg was there. His organisation has never answered for killing 16 Serbian journalists in the 1999 bombing of Belgrade.

Representatives from Bahrain, with the world’s second-worst record of jailing journalists, Mali, where journalists are expelled for covering human rights abuses, Israel, which killed seven journalists in Gaza last year, and Georgia and Bulgaria, where beating journalists is common, all offered lip service to media freedom.

While Benjamin Netanyahu urged French Jews to seek refuge in expansionist Israel, Malian Muslim Lassana Bathily was revealed as having helped several Jewish shoppers escape detection in the kosher supermarket.

He turned off the stockroom freezer, hiding them inside before sneaking out through a fire escape to give police a key to open the store’s metal shutters and rescue the hostages.

Malik Merabet, whose police officer brother Ahmed Merabet was killed by the gunmen last Wednesday, pleaded through tears for unity yesterday, saying that Islam must not be conflated with extremism.